Tsimshian Treasures: The Remarkable Journey of the Dundas Collection. Donald Ellis, ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. 144 pp.Reviewed by Christopher F. RothThis
sparely arranged, visually pleasing volume—an exhibit catalogue
enhanced with several essays—lands amid one of the more controversial
museum exhibits in the recent history of Canadian First Nations art:
forty Tsimshian artifacts that spent decades hidden in private hands
and surrounded by myth and rumor, surfacing on the auction block in New
York in 2006 and fetching a world-record take ($7 million) for a Native
American collection.
The
pieces were originally collected in 1863 on a visit to Metlakatla,
British Columbia, by the Rev. Robert James Dundas. He procured them
from William Duncan, the dissident Anglican lay missionary who ran the
tiny Tsimshian village as a utopian fiefdom. The circumstances of the
transfer are murky, as is the story behind Duncan’s having them in the
first place: his job was not to hoard or sell objects but to eradicate
the Tsimshian customs they represented. The spotty written record (more
on that below) leaves it unclear whether or not Dundas bought them
outright.
For
143 years the objects were in the Dundas family’s possession. They
decorated the family’s billiard room and children played charades with
them. Dundas’s great-grandson, Simon Carey, who eventually brought them
to auction, at one point had to stop his mother and aunt from throwing
the collection away. He died nine days after the auction.
I
recall the impotent anger expressed in Tsimshian communities when word
of the impending auction emerged in 2006, especially considering that
some of the objects had belonged to the legendary chief Paul Legaic.
Legaic’s rejection of “heathenism” under Duncan’s influence was the
pivotal point in the Christianization of the Tsimshian. Alan L.
Hoover’s contribution to this volume, “The History of the Dundas
Collection,” describes the historical and cultural context
satisfactorily for the nonspecialist, connecting the written record
with what can be discerned from the objects themselves, though
Tsimshianists will find some of his occasional dips into the
ethnographic record to clarify details of Tsimshian heraldry
unsatisfyingly preliminary.
A
few pages from Dundas’s own diaries are reproduced in the volume but in
tantalizingly short excerpts. There is no mention of the controversy
over Carey’s son’s refusal to make the full texts of the original
diaries, which are still in England, available to scholars.[1]
One can only wonder, as Tsimshian leaders ramp up their anger over the
circumstances of the objects’ acquisition: what are Dundas’s
descendants hiding?There
are no answers to such questions in Tsimshian Treasures. Most of the
essays (the powerful concluding essay by the Tsimshian weaver William
White is an exception) to some extent set aside the collection’s
weightier implications for repatriation, sovereignty, and the politics
of cultural representation. This is because this volume is in a sense a
peace treaty between warring sides: Tsimshians and their allies who
feel collectors and distant museums have no right to the pieces, versus
collectors and exhibitors who feel the matter is now settled. For
example, the contribution by Sarah Milroy, a Globe and Mail reporter,
on the ceremonies surrounding the objects’ unveiling at the Museum of
Northern British Columbia (an institution that works closely with
Tsimshian chiefs) alludes to controversy but seems more like a
travel-section feature story, ending on an upbeat, redemptive note.
The
major question for many Tsimshians is whether the objects were stolen
or given up freely. Answers are inherently elusive. To suggest that
Legaic was somehow coerced into abandoning his traditions for
Christianity bucks the emerging trend in missionary studies in general
and Tsimshian studies in particular, highlighting indigenous agency in
missionization. Indeed, amid today’s Tsimshian cultural renaissance, it
is hard to imagine a powerful chief surrendering his hereditary
privileges to adopt Christianity and white culture. Older Tsimshians
may find such ambivalence about one’s own culture sadly familiar. But
was Legaic even authorized under Tsimshian law to surrender objects
that in another sense belong to the rest of his lineage (who, mostly,
did not convert at that time)? Or do his descendants and fellow
tribesmen now have an automatic claim? And what about objects with no
clear lineage provenance? Duncan did not quite use force to convert the
Tsimshian, but he was not above, for example, claiming that
Metlakatla’s loss of only five lives in a smallpox epidemic, while
nearby “heathen” Port Simpson lost 250, was God’s will. Maybe he
believed it himself. But, for a culture convinced of a relationship
between disease and spirit power, isn’t Duncan’s use of those arguments
a kind of coercion?
Amid
these serious moral and legal questions, it is jarring to read Donald
Ellis, the Ontario collector responsible for the collection’s auction,
write about another kind of repatriation: his eagerness to see the
objects sold to Canadian collectors rather than (perish the thought)
Americans or other foreigners. For him, bringing the objects from
England to Ontario is repatriation enough. Anyone familiar with the
complex Tsimshian system of lineage property rights will wince reading
Ellis’s assertion that “this group of objects … belonged to Canada and
all Canadians” (p. 13). Whether it is land or culture or artifacts,
First Nations people by now know what is really intended when an
outsider claims that something of theirs “belongs to everyone.” Reading
White’s cogent words in this volume and looking at Shannon Mendes’s
stunning (but, frustratingly, uncaptioned) accompanying photographs of
Tsimshian elders marveling at the Dundas Collection in the Museum of
Northern British Columbia, one thing is clear: Tsimshians feel proud of
these objects, but they also feel robbed.Note1. See: Alexandra Gill (2007) “Native Treasures Travel without Companion Diaries.” Globe and Mail. May 3: R3. American Ethnologist, B.C. Studies, Ethnohistory,
Chris
Roth teaches anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and
has pursued ethnographic and ethnohistorical research among the
Tsimshian in British Columbia since 1995. He has contributed to
numerous scholarly journals, includingand Wicazo Sa Review.