Native American Voices on Identity, Art and Culture: Objects of Everlasting Esteem.
Lucy Fowler Williams, William Wierzbowski, and Robert W. Purcel,
editors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology
and Anthropology, 2005. 220 pp.Reviewed by Jason Baird JacksonThis is a useful and compelling book. Native American Voices on Identity, Art and Culture’s
style is accessible but dignified; its format is that of a serious but
enjoyable coffee-table book. The photographs and printing are well
executed and the book has several qualities that recommend it to
scholars in the field of museum anthropology, particularly those whose
work connects them to American Indian communities and collections.Seventy-eight
color plates, each picturing one or more items of Native North American
material culture from the collections of the University of Pennsylvania
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (UPM) share the book’s central
stage with 58 different Native North American artists, scholars and
intellectuals, each of whom reflects in a page or less of text (via an
essay, reflection, poem, or personal narrative) upon the chosen object
or objects and the book’s larger themes, which include art, history,
resistance, ancestors, deities, and biography. (Some contributors are
paired with more than one image, accounting for the two figures.) The
objects and the narratives are typically compelling, occasionally
arresting, frequently enlightening.To
convey a taste of the work, readers are, for example, shown (verso) an
image (with catalog details) of four wooden combs collected by Frank G.
Speck among the North Carolina Cherokee and offered (recto) a brief
poem (titled “Naming”) on the theme of combs as manifestation of love
by Diane Glancy, an author and educator with ties to the Oklahoma
Cherokee (pp. 104-105). Exemplifying a more conventional didactic
narrative, Lakota anthropologist Beatrice Medicine, whose recent
passing occurred soon after this volume was published, interprets the
use and significance of a beaded woman’s robe collected among her
people in the late 19th century (pp. 130-131). Similarly, Choctaw
archaeologist Joe Watkins reflects upon four Clovis and Folsom points
recovered from the Blackwater Draw Site in Clovis, New Mexico (pp.
190-191), while Tlingit scholar, author and playwright Nora Marks
Dauenhauer, discusses the clan history and social significance of the
Two Door House Tunic, revealing along the way the history of its
initial fashioning, its successive refashionings, after multiple
disappearances from the community, and it eventual rediscovery in, in
these three instantiations, collections outside Tlingit country,
including the UPM example whose image is the starting point for her
essay (pp. 188-189).While
diverse in community affiliation, occupation and orientation toward the
significance of museums and museum collections, the contributors are
all established and well-known figures in some sector of Native North
American arts and letters, thus the perspectives represented are skewed
away from those that might be found in a more representative sample of
American Indian people.[1]
The project organizers and editors, Lucy Fowler Williams, William
Wierzbowski, and Robert W. Preucel, all of the UPM American Section,
acknowledge and describe the practical constraints within which the
volume was assembled (pp. 10-12). They had hoped to invite a
significant range of collaborators to the museum for firsthand study of
the objects, but financial limitations meant that only a dozen such
visits were accomplished and that most of the objects were selected by
the editors and commented upon via images and correspondence.Having
sketched the place of the UPM in a wider, sometimes problematic,
history of anthropological research and museological practice, the
editors observe that “this book seeks to situate ethnographic objects
within contemporary Native American discourse as a way of emphasizing
their enduring significance (p. 10). The goal, seen through a
conception of the current era as one marked by the emergence of
museum-source community collaboration, is framed using the interpretive
language of the “social life of things” and by five section groupings
viewed by the editors as unifying themes emergent in the many
commentaries: “Hands--Acts of Creation,” Hearts--Compassion and
Strength in History and Resistance,” “Spirits--Guidance from Ancestors
and Deities,” “Footsteps--Biography and Life Experience,” and
“Eyes--Looking Forward for Future Generations.”This
volume will see regular use for a number of reasons. Through its paired
narratives and images, it enhances scholarly knowledge of the
particular objects presented, and of the genres and peoples with whom
these are associated. It thus expands the documentary record in useful
ways. As a sampler of the UPM North American holdings, the volume is
also a valuable resource for scholars, although it is biased in the
direction of artistic masterworks and high profile specimens. The
editors' introductory essay provides useful background on the history
of the museum’s work in Native North America, and it, along with UPM
Director Richard M. Leventhal’s “Foreword,” sketches the directions
that the museum would like to pursue in its future engagements with
Native American people and communities.The
matter is beyond the scope of a review such as this, but I would be
eager to see the field of museum anthropology systematically consider
the ways that volumes such as this one, built first and foremost,
around an original collection of Native American narratives, are used
in small- and medium-scale exhibition-making projects. Works like this,
along with such things as artist’s statements, Indian Arts and Crafts
Board brochures, and classic ethnographic text collections are all
regularly used as sources for interpretive-textual material by curators
wishing to diffuse a no-longer-welcome authoritative and monolithic
curatorial voice, but who lack the means of consulting effectively with
relevant Native American source communities. Such simulated dialogical
presentation is even common in large, better-resourced museums working
with American Indian materials and I suspect that such a technique is
also used elsewhere in the representation of other kinds of source
communities. I am not condemning this practice, only suggesting that it
remains incompletely acknowledged and rather unexamined in both the
critical and methodological literatures. Just as this volume’s editors
seek to track changing understandings of the objects in their
curatorial care, across space and time, museum anthropology would be
usefully served if we could consider the new uses to which the
narratives and knowledge assembled in Native American Voices on Identity, Art and Culture, and works like it, will be put.Note1.
In drawing upon a pool of available native scholars and intellectuals,
the organizers privileged those most able to craft accessible and
compelling responses in fluent standard English. They also turned to
people who are particularly accessible to, and amenable to, such
projects. The difficulties that would attend to a similar effort aimed
are engaging a wider assortment of consultants on a continent-wide
basis would be nearly insurmountable, but thinking about such an
undertaking is a valuable thought experiment, especially if one
imagines including people who are utterly hostile to museums or who are
completely unfamiliar with them, in addition to sampling the broader,
and staggering, diversity--cultural, social, educational, linguistic,
economic, religious, class, gender, sexual orientation--characteristic
of Indian Country today.Jason Baird Jackson is the editor of Museum Anthropology. This review originally appeared on museumanthropology.blogspot.com on December 4, 2006.