THE SCRIVER ARTIFACT COLLECTION

Most of this blog post is known to the older Blackfeet who live on the rez, so this will be mostly for those who are young or from away.  It is about artifacts but it is also about society and about change and about “things.”  The Scriver Artifact Collection was the accumulation of objects in the ownership of T.E. Scriver, Harold Scriver and Robert Scriver.  I note that at no point were any of the objects considered the property of any of the Scriver women:  Ellison Westgarth Scriver, Hazel Scriver, Laurel Scriver, Betty Lee Scriver, Margaret Paul, Mary Scriver, Michelle or Charmaine DeSmet, or the two daughters of James Scriver.  Nor were James Scriver or Laurel’s two sons considered owners.  

This was true until Lorraine Scriver, Robert’s fourth wife, inherited everything in his estate, except the objects sold to the Royal Provincial Alberta Museum in Edmonton.  At that point there was a lot of swapping back and forth.  In a few years Lorraine died and everything went to the Montana Historical Society.  Again, there was a lot of swapping back and forth.  Some objects were returned to Canadian Blackfoot people and some were returned to American Blackfeet people.  As far as I know, the tribal entities were never involved, only selected individuals.  Some of the objects were not artifacts but rather a gun collection and a collection of historic RCMP uniforms.

This accounting is from a European point of view which gives precedence to actual possession and to male dominance.  From a Blackfeet point of view, those women who participated in ceremonies become connected to them -- you might call that “ownership” or you might not.  These people would be myself, Lorraine, and Michelle.  Unless there was a ceremony I don’t know about, I am the only woman who had the Thunder Pipe Bundle formally transferred to me (when Bob acquired it) and in fact he could not have had it transferred without a wife.  Richard Little Dog was the ceremonialist.

Complicating things even further, Bob Scriver’s artifacts included many objects, including his painted Badger tipi, that were ceremonial and created by him in the Blackfeet way according to dreams.  (He had these dreams when I was with him, married to him and sleeping beside him.)  So are they native American artifacts or are they Scriver art?    People, especially white people and even museum anthropologists, find it impossible to tell which of the newer objects were created by Bob and which were made by Native Americans.  He himself mixed them.  He also commissioned things like buckskin suits and head dresses to wear as the leader of the Blackfeet Tribal Band in the Fifties.  Cecile Horn made most of these things.  Are they sacred tribal artifacts or commissioned items, bought and paid for?  

The next step is that Bob as a sculptor portrayed the ceremonies in sculptures and included portraits of those old people who accepted them, including George and Molly Kicking Woman, the youngest of the circle as we first knew it.  Now that Joe Old Chief is gone, I may be the only living member of that group.  Bob replaced my portrait with Mary Blackman and himself with Charlie Reevis.  

Margaret Many Guns acted as surrogate wife for Richard Little Dog which meant she and I exchanged clothing.  I still have the dress and moccasins she made for me: they are quite plain and the only artifacts I keep.  I do not participate in the ceremonies.  What I DO have is a closely written account of the whole process and the things I have learned, which propelled me into a career as a Unitarian Universalist minister, a ceremonialist rather than an anthropologist.  

The Thunder Pipe Bundle that was ceremonially transferred to Bob and I has been missing since his death.  It never went to Edmonton in the collection because he was opening it annually and kept it smudged and “alive” in his studio.  There were many theories and suspicions about what Lorraine did with it.  She was intensely hostile to me, refusing to communicate, telling the Blackfeet that the Pipe Bundle was “dead” and therefore none of their business.  In the end “we” meaning myself and Blackfeet friends, concluded that an artifact as dynamic and self-determining as this Bundle is capable of going where it wants to.  When it is so inclined, it will re-appear. 

In the meantime the larger culture, in particular two sub-cultures -- those who acquire and trade in NA artifacts and those who pursue the traders on behalf of the federal government -- have collided with such ferocity that many artifacts disappear at the US borders.  Criminalization with huge threatened fines and incarceration have caused a series of suicides.  In my opinion, if whites are involved on any of this, there is no high ground on which to stand.  It is a swamp battlefield, much of it underground and corrupt on both sides.  The magic word is “eagle.”  The control of dead eagles is the high card, even as wind turbines convert the living birds into eagle pieces.  The concerns of tribal members are sort of peripheral.

And so are museums because they are ordinarily not dynamic enough to turn a profit.  However, the National Museum of the American Indian ingeniously capitalized on the value of the popular “Twilight” films by displaying the Olivella shell necklace, a paddle necklace, a drum and a dream catcher that Jacob gives to Bella.  “Quileute Werewolves as depicted in the Twilight movies aren’t all phony. There is some basis of truth. The National Museum of the American Indian investigates further the rich history and culture of the original Quileute people and their relation to the wolves.  In the exhibition, “Behind the Scenes: The Real Story of the Quileute Wolves”, the artwork includes wooden whaling harpooning tools, wolf headdresses, replicas of props as seen in the Twilight films and other objects of the like. The Quileute ancestors were renowned whalers, craftsmen, and huntsmen.”  The display ended in May.   

Secrecy and hiddenness go with artifacts and ceremonies at their core.  They carry entitlement.  So now the movie props for the “Twilight” series have added popular charisma to traditional ceremonial value.  

http://americanindian.si.edu/subpage.cfm?subpage=exhibitions&second=dc&third=current  

http://www.quileutenation.org

Actual objects also carry entitlement, which motivates acts of restoration, repatriation and return.  Thus, the premier of Edmonton restored the Bundles in the Scriver Collection to Blackfoot and Blackfeet owners, and recently a headdress was restored to a descendent of Richard Little Dog.  This bonnet is no longer seen as a Parade Indian accouterment (it is a Sioux bonnet, made contemporary) but as a sacred object.  I do not object to any of this.  I no longer value physical possession of things.  (Except for books.)  I’m glad for Forrest to have that bonnet regardless of where it came from. 

Before Bob let the Scriver Collection go to Edmonton, he had everything carefully photographed for a book that he paid to have made.  The bonnet being handed to Forrest in the Glacier Reporter photo is not pictured in the book recording the Scriver Collection, so it may have had another source.  Perhaps it belongs to Flaherty, whose belongings were stored together with the Scriver materials at the Montana Historical Society.)   

You can find copies of “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” by Bob Scriver on the Internet used book websites.  The cost goes up and down.  It is now the only “real” Scriver Collection, since the actual items have been separated and distributed.  The printer (who was paid by Bob to print the book, though the man called himself a publisher) never returned the computer files to Bob in spite of pleas and threats.  He could print more of these books,   Bob’s lawyer omitted the disposition of rights to self-published books from the will, so the Montana Historical Society has ambiguous control.

The only rational response on my part is laughter.  I have the story and the memories.  I’ll just wait to see what that Thunder Pipe Bundle might do next..

THE ULTIMATE DIMENSION OF ARTIFACTS

In the beginning of James Clifford’s chapter on collecting art and culture, he quotes a poem by James Fenton:  “ The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.”  The Museum is one of those crammed, unsorted, jumbled places full of oddities and atrocities, the very opposite of an orderly, properly labeled, clean and well-lighted place.  In fact, probably much more like the places the collections came from.  He quotes the opening and then a later stanza:

“Go,

As a historian of ideas or a sex-offender,

For the primitive art,

As a dusty semiologist, equipped to unravel

The seven components of that witch’s curse

Or the syntax of the mutilated teeth.  Go

in groups to giggle at curious finds.

But do not step into the kingdom of your promises

To yourself, like a child entering the forbidden

Woods of his lonely playtime.”

Clifford adds:  “Do not step into this tabooed zone ‘laid with the snares of privacy and fiction/ And the dangerous Third Wish’ a personal “forbidden woods” -- exotic, desired, savage and governed by the (paternal) law.”

So what is this “dangerous Third Wish”?  I think it is about identity and therefore must be dangerous two ways:  narcissism and anthropocentrism.  That is, first, losing the connection to people who are “other” because of preoccupation with one’s self, and, second, thinking that the world is about human beings.  If one collects Native American objects or practices as “curiosities,” even as aesthetic objects without connection to their makers, then the collection is empty.   Their human meaning is lost.  What remains is what you-the-collector admire or associate with them.  It’s easy to make the objects into child’s toys.

The other problem lies along the boundary between what is emotional (attachment, identification, love) and what is spiritual, some power quite beyond any human mind.  If one is collecting as an emotional enterprise, then what one finds is fair game for children’s play, for books and movies, for paintings and sculptures, even historical assumptions.  Many people are very much attached to what they know about American Indian cultures in just this way and it can be quite a majestic and moral motive, like maybe “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” or the Museum of the American Indian on the Washington Mall.  They aren’t “bad,” but they can be transgressive and they can cheapen important objects with imitations and misunderstanding.

When I was small, my parents went to the Pendleton Roundup and brought us each back a certain kind of Indian doll.  They just fit into a grownup’s hand and seemed to be an Indian wrapped up in a blanket with a realistic head at the top.  There are some sophisticated versions at http://www.native-expressions.com/native_style_dolls.html  I took mine apart, expecting to see a body inside, but it was only stuffing.  They were realistic, amusing, nice for a child to hold, human, even thought-provoking.  This is what I mean by an emotional connection.

There is another dimension in some artifacts that is much older.  “Spiritual” is a weak word.  “God” is an ownership word.  Maybe “Mystery” will do.  What I’m trying to get to is the numinous, overwhelming, terrifying sense of existence, which can grip a person on a starry night, in the midst of a whiteout blizzard, on a bleached-dry desert, or an alpine peak screaming with wind.  I think this is the dimension of the Third Wish, the wish to be drawn into that strange existence beyond all emotion or familiarity where the great visionaries have felt hot/cold, falling/clasped, dazzled/unseeing, as they report to us when they have recovered -- if they ever return.  It is not a matter of death.  It is beyond either death or life.  Maybe Tillich’s Ground of Being.

Some indigenous cultures will speak of harmony and the yearning and necessity to stay in harmony.  They don’t mean anything trivial.  The ultimate harmony is to lose one’s identity, which is death except that if one has joined eternity, there is no death.  It is only terrifying here on this side, not after one has entered it.  

Not only do we seem to have diminished this experience into horror movies, but we seem unable to connect with the original power of the uncanny, even when presented with the gorgeous gyring of the cosmos in deep space images.  I think this is because of clutching our identity tightly, a narcissism, and because we have never let our imaginations reach for eternity and infinity.  We know they’re there, but like Calvin and Hobbs, we hurry back indoors.

Properly managed and if sensory connections to either the original referents or equivalents are found in the existing world, religious artifacts can be a way of putting aside the necessity of being merely “us,” a burden in our daily lives.  We look for it in sex or drugs or extreme sports or the invasion of other peoples, but the threshold is always the inner self as it interfaces with whatever is beyond human perception, which is a contradiction in itself.  

This is not unlike the attempt to conceptualize a god who is beyond human concepts and which always collapses into the narcissistic defense of the status quo or the destruction of all else in the name of human survival.  One must give oneself up in order to transcend oneself, a terrifying prospect.  What happens to the body at that point is an open question because it depends on the existence of the physical world, which may not have been there in the first place.  This is the concept of “dream.”

Hoarding objects, even for scientific study or to preserve their preciousness to many people, denies the reality of the Beyond.  There’s nothing “wrong” about this so long as one has no wish to go farther.  It will always require the settling of competing interests both within and without the originating group, and this can mean violence or it can mean laws that are unable to provide justice -- only order and peace.  But it is the senses that control the consciousness.

From 1,000fragrances, a daily blog by Octavian Coifan

http://1000fragrances.blogspot.com/2011/09/myrrhiad-pierre-guillaume-new-fragrance.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FCDyN+%281000fragrances%29

With "Myrrhiad," Pierre Guillaume . . . goes to the roots of the 8th Art writing the new rituals of perfumery with a precious material found at the heart of Religion and which portrays the constant human desire to go beyond the senses. . . .

Myriad of years go, the 8th ART emerged from the earliest sacred rituals and Myrrh was one the ingredients which accompanied these first forms of religion and the endless human desire to reach the infinite.

This time, the highly talented perfumer who signed an impressive number of modern highly original and creative fragrances, is drawing an imaginary bridge across time and cultures. He links the most ancient ritual of myrrh, a sacred ingredient burnt in the first temples of humanity (and complementary to incense) with the Asian ritual of tea. If myrrh is a ritual of smoke and scent performed inside the coldness and darkness of stone temples in a "social" space accessible to very few, the tea is about taste and the hot vapors, a ritual of intimacy accessible to everyone. Outside (communion with the others and with the Gods) and Inside (the enclosed space of intimate thoughts in silence). . . .Pierre Guillaume is playing with the concepts of scent and taste in an absolutely astonishing way. He takes 2 major cultural references and twists each with the signs of the other. Myrrh becomes bitter and sweet like a cup of black tea with sugar. The tea becomes black, smoked, bitter and highly scented like the real smoke of myrrh. . . . collective memory and intimacy.

(This is the end of this phase of the series.)

NATIVE AMERICAN ARTIFACTS HAUNT US

I don’t hear about many people wanting to collect “artifacts” of the 21st century Blackfeet, though some want to buy Western style paintings or objects like beaded tennis shoes or baseball caps.  I suppose an enterprising person could sell beaded iPod holders or rawhide Kindle covers.  In fact, this sort of thing is made and often kept by tribal members themselves.  At graduation mortarboards are beaded by relatives as an honoring.  New Pendleton blankets are awarded as honor gifts.  Military members are honored with eagle feathers.  The symbolic artifacts of the 21st century are by Indians for Indians.

Sometimes I wonder whether the true fixation is not on the actual objects of the 19th century so much as it is on the 19th century itself.  Plenty of people want to re-enact Civil War or Mountain Man events and lifestyles.  Now and then someone will come to the reservation expecting to step into a 19th century world.  Even the little co-ed who insisted she was only interested in joining the true lives of the People -- except that she couldn’t figure out the roads -- had in mind a 19th century fantasy of free living and possibly free loving.  Romantic in every sense.

Some of the “collectors” in the 1960’s crossed over into participation in ceremonial life: Bundle Opening ceremonies and so on.  As far as I know, Bob Scriver was the only white Bundle Keeper (not counting me, who was just a newcomer auxiliary anyway, since a Keeper is supposed to have a wife) who grew up here with the People; he was the same age as George Kicking Woman and James Welch, Sr., father of the novelist, and probably had his hands on the material culture of buffalo, small mammals and birds more than either of them.  Even I slept with foxes, bobcats and gophers.  But others learned the prayers, the songs, the protocols and Adolph Hungry Wolf goes so far as to live a 19th century life in a cabin so remote he runs his computer off a photovoltaic panel.  He and his former wife Beverly (who is genetically Blackfoot) wrote many books about how to create objects, how to regard the land, and so on.

In some ways the language is the ultimate intangible artifact.  People, both Blackfeet and not, have in the past been afraid to learn their own language because they were punished in school for speaking it.  This harsh treatment was extended to all immigrants to force them to become “American”, but Indians were not immigrants.  The English speakers were and they were simply more powerful.  Their strategy worked for decades, demonizing and stigmatizing the speaking of the original language.  

Then came a revolution in our understanding of language, so it was a high value to be multi-lingual esp. when dealing with a “dead” or diminished language so it was not a threat to the standing order.  We began to understand that a language was not “just” a language (what is the word for “dog”) but also a map of the world, a specific view of the world packed with information about it that might not be available without the language.  

The dark side of that came up when many people tried to learn Blackfeet -- those notorious romantic co-eds again -- and discovered it’s a lot more than just learning a vocabulary off some cue cards.  In fact, immersion schools for youngsters supported by their tribal families who can expose them to recordings or elders, the use of particular methods (acting out words while one speaks them with others), and the political will to stick with it -- these will work.  But it not just a matter of good will and a dictionary.

Two powerful cultures run into each other like a tide meeting a river with much mingling and opposing force.  The benefit is in rethinking practices previously taken for granted, but the dark side of that is loss.  Being acculturated enough to maneuver in the post-modern world is tough enough.  Preserving one’s identity-heritage in the midst of fighting for prosperity makes the task even harder, sometimes an exercise in split-personality, particularly when the larger culture has the media on its side, perpetuating stereotypes instead of going to the heart of the reality, which requires constantly renegotiating.  This is what Sherman Alexie calls the “Toughest Indian in the World,” the 19th century one that lives in our stubborn imaginations.  But killing that icon will be a loss to whites.

Why is it so stubborn?  I have some ideas.  One is that Indian Wars are part of a “founding” time, though the 19th century prairie clearances are the ones that have stuck, the defining “war” that helps us sort of sidle past the just-preceding and overlapping Civil War between the States.  We are stuck between seeing native Americans as ravenous savages whom we had to defeat in order to claim the continent, and seeing them as victims, but our rather guiltily cherished and ennobled “others.”  Ambivalence is always tenacious.  When we buy scalps to hang in our “man cave,” that’s one side.  When we buy a white buckskin fringed and beaded parade shirt for $200,000 and hang it in the front room, that’s another side.  A beaded key chain is another. 

Even in small white villages next to the rez, which is probably where racism burns the hottest because of competition for resources, the “broken arrow” narrative persists.  It is brotherhood in the Romeo and Juliet mode, across the unreasonable social barriers that divide us, which is a moral force against the idea that one has permission to kill anyone not like “us.”

Native American artifacts, whether objects or songs, whether explicitly secular or specifically religious, whether made, found, dug up, stolen, or bought, carry within themselves -- as surely as bread and wine -- the emotional and cultural content of major forces in our world and in our brains.  Because of that their treatment needs to be guided by careful thought and strong laws.  Otherwise the passion of them escapes into political confrontations capable of harming everyone, but most particularly our ideas of how to co-exist with each other despite our differences.H

OWNERSHIP OF NATIVE AMERICAN ARTIFACTS

“Ownership” is a concept caught in a vise by globalization.  Who can own land?  Who can own children?  Who can own a country?  Who can own artifacts?  There is no agreement.  But we must decide.  Here’s a list of issues:

Colliding cultures:  One culture, usually the older one, awards ownership according to the creation and use of the object.  Another culture, particularly the juggernaut of European common law, asserts that ownership must respond to rules that are written and judged, involving matters of inheritance, documents and payment.  Another culture assumes that everything belongs to the community according to need.  One of the most intriguing ideas is that artifacts belong to themselves: have lives, functions and consequences of their own.  So that the Thunder Pipe Bundle of which I am a “Keeper” according to the transfer of guardianship (NOT ownership), is not in a known location because it doesn’t want to be.  It will return when the circumstances are right for its own goals.

Fractionated ownership:  something that plainly belonged to one person is inherited by many descendants.  But only one takes possession.  This is closely related to Solomon’s problem: who is the mother of the child, the one who gives birth or the one who gives care?

Value gradients:  a thing that is worthless in one place and time might be very precious at another time and place.  Here’s an extreme example:  air is all over, we all breathe it,  No one owns it.  But some practices and conditions remove its life-giving property.  So who owns it now?  Maybe the point is more clear if we talk about water.

Popularity:  creating a demand for something is not so hard but can jack up or diminish the value of something.  Maybe for excellent reasons (think drug rehab) and maybe for lousy reasons (Is profit a lousy reason?  Interior decoration?  Self-aggrandizement?  All pertain to artifacts.)  It’s not so much the grounds for ownership as the aggrandizement of ownership.

Emotional:  I once went round-and-round with Dan Aadland about a tree burial on his ranch.  He felt a strong connection to it and was respectful of it, but considered himself the owner.  Against this was the tribal assertion that it was THEIR tribesman, possibly genetic ancestor, who was there and this trumped his attachment.  He could not POSSIBLY own that tree burial.  He could not see that the two claims conflicted.  The only reason I did myself was because a small number of native American women decided to improve my consciousness, which took days.

Commodification:  Something need not be owned to be commodified.  My usual examples are the practice of saying how much a grizzly bear is “worth” for the purpose of preserving their habitat and the budget set aside for their study.  More gruesome are the lists of values for body parts that insurance companies use.  Who “owns” your limbs or liver?

Secondary and tertiary value:  Relics of movie stars, their images, rights, reputations.  All in turmoil.  Bob Scriver’s will failed to address the rights to his books, the rights to posters of his work, and -- lucky for me -- accounts of his life.  But the law is saying that descendants can “own” the reputation of a famous ancestor and prevent anyone else from saying anything about it.

Political value:  The right to take a photo of an Indian person or their lodge or home has expanded to the right to take a photo or trespass on any part of the landscape that has spiritual value to the Blackfeet, including the Rocky Mountains and Chief Mountain.  The pushback has been to demand concrete proof of “religious” use, which is not the same as “spiritual,” or to demand a limit, a boundary, which is not possible since the distinction between religious and secular is not existent in Blackfeet terms.  There is no secular, there is no separation of church v. state.  The religious is the political.  Can one own one’s own God?  One’s sacred places, despite real estate value?

Value of intangibles:  One sort of “artifact” is story or cultural knowledge about a group.  The assertion is that only the people who belong to that group can write about the group.  (Sherman Alexie is strong on the subject.)  And yet many tribal members hurry to tell old stories to non-Indians and only a few, still, have achieved the credentials to act as anthropologists.  (Whatever that is now.)  The conviction of the tribal member is that if white people made money writing about them, then it should work for the tribal members, too.  But times have changed and the younger writers don’t know much about the old ways except what they were told by older relatives and what they read that has been written down by white people.  The problem is much complicated by the Blackfeet having lived in an oral culture and the early white writers being very much culture-bound so that their insight was blinkered.  Few tribal members are readers, esp. now in the age of video and music, so they simply don’t know what’s out there and so far no entity (though SALT is trying) has found the key to producing consistently marketable material.  So why own it?  Because Indians need to make money.

Dominance of the flashy:  The big value goes to the bright stuff.  A parade Indian’s beaded suit, carefully matched in pattern which is a Euro-concept, sells for more money than a painting by a well-known non-Indian artist.  I mean, thousands.  The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art was recently sued (2008) by a dealer for the return of such a shirt on grounds that the first owner stole it and sold it to the second owner who donated it to the Eiteljorg.  The dealer, Robert Vandenberg, valued the shirt at $200,000. 

Neglect of the homely:  My usual example is the digging stick, the trowel the Indian woman used to harvest the prairie to supplement a meat diet.  The digging stick of the woman was the equivalent of the claws of a grizzly, who eats the same diet, but one grizzly claw sells for a considerable sum while an authentic digging stick would be lucky to sell at all.  If anyone realized what it was.

Profiteering by brokers, explainers, and consultants:  People run websites promising to show artifact collectors have to evade the law about ownership.  They don’t do that for free.  Middlemen always capture as much profit as they can.

Gifts:  My ceremonial mocs and dress were made specifically for me and given to me by the maker.  So are they mine or not?  How would I prove it?  Must one demand a bill of sale from every tribal person who makes and gives or even already “owns” and gives an object to you?  Some of the objects in the Scriver artifact collection were gifts.  Others were not.  There is no paper “European” evidence of either.  This means that someone who produced proof of ownership could go into a museum and demand artifacts be returned.  And they do. 

Repatriation:  Slightly different is the claim that a nation owns its artifacts and that Indians nations still exist and are sovereign.  The Edmonton Royal Museum of Alberta already headed off this sort of event by returning all Sacred Bundles from the Scriver collection to elders of the Blackfoot tribes, making them responsible for ascertaining ownership.  Immediately, the Piegans on the Montana side of the line claimed ownership.  The tension is not always between cultures or countries, as it is with Greece demanding the return of their antiquities from the Getty Museum.

It will take centuries to sort all this out into a consensus.  Maybe that’s what the Scriver Thunderpipe Bundle is waiting for.  Then it will show up, having been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

EVIL ARTIFACTS

An anonymous commenter says, “Things, objects, places, even people can feel tangibly holy. And the reverse is true, things, places, etc. can feel unholy. Not profane merely, but malignant.”

I have a pretty good idea who this commenter is: someone who is powerless.  But the person is provocative.  There’s not much in the scholarly literature about artifacts that are UNholy, but there is a huge thrashing wilderness of materials about the “dark” side, explained by people who claim to know and control them.  We tend to see Euro culture as well-lighted, even blonde, but the most powerful Madonna statues are the ones of dark women, and one of the most evil-identified symbols is the Nazi swastika, imposed by a man who valued genetic blondness, though his other secret preoccupation was excrement.  Aside from genocide. 

So far as I know, no one has done fMRI studies to see whether malignant consciousness shows up in different parts of the brain than salvific consciousness.  I suspect both are regulated in the forebrain over the eyebrows, since the difference is mostly a matter of moral judgment.

The need for concepts of evil comes from fear, loss, guilt, shame and so on.  Being out of control.  Coveting something inaccessible.  Deserving punishment.  These would light up different parts of the brain.  I would argue that there are not three categories: sacred, profane and malignant, but rather two main ones: empowered and ordinary, each with subsets of good v. evil.  That is, if one stays in the profane or secular world, the issues don’t come up.  It is science, but we know that science without morality can go evil, so maybe I’m wrong.

There are two big watersheds of “evil” artifacts: one comes from Africa, esp after it had mixed in the Caribbean with local authochthonous elements and  another one that comes from reversing Christian concepts -- Satanism and so on.  Santeria or voodoo we think of in terms of finding a witch fetish -- chicken foot, toad skin, bat wings -- or maybe an effigy with pins stuck in it.  The other we think of in terms of the old cultures of Europe bursting up through Christian ideas, the Cross reversed to become Thor’s hammer, the Madonna pushed over by witches.  And Satan, who seems to slither in from the Middle East.   Both bags of evil are anthropocentric.  But that may be true of all evil: what without a human victim is evil?

Among Native Americans, the terrifying rip-out-hearts obsidian knives of Incas, the ghostly weird faces of Inuit masks, and the distorted hunger masks of the woodlands peoples go directly to one’s nightmares and fever dreams.  The masks, in particular, seem to echo distortions of people’s faces, which can be the source of our most beloved images OR the source of fear.  

What I’ve become conscious of in the last few months is how Native Americans, esp. those who live in places where survival is always in doubt, may not have used alcohol or other toxins to alter their consciousness, but were well-aware of the consciousness-altering forces of starvation, dehydration, fever, hypothermia, and pain.  Many ritual ordeals were acts that invited loss of control, hallucination, and wavering identity so as not to fear them.  Artifacts connected to these ordeals signify transformation and courage, not evil.

Scalps carry whatever ascription the observer can muster.  Dripping with fresh blood and severed from a loved one, it’s hard to think of anything more evil.  Dried in a hoop, hundreds of years old, hanging in a display case, the same object becomes a source of curiosity, a prompt for collecting.  The evil then becomes a matter of attaching the practice of scalping to a culture: Indians claiming they were paid by white people to bring in scalps of enemies.  Whites claiming it was an atavistic urge like that of American soldiers in Vietnam collecting indigenous ears.  But this discussion is carrying us too close to the regard for human bodies, which is a whole different shelf in the library.

To recapitulate, malign artifacts are generally powerful -- why would anyone want to violate propriety and virtue otherwise?  They associate to shame, guilt, rage, yearning (which might or might not be venal), and whatever is “other,” outside “us” and therefore stigmatized.  In England such matters are often described as “French.”   In Blackfeet country they are often ascribed to the “Cree.”  Cree Medicine is witchy.  

Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine” is the same as Cree Medicine.  She and Ray Young Bear have been the writers most willing to look at the evil supernatural.  For Louise such matters often haunt the Catholic assumptions.  For Young Bear there’s more of a willingness to think about ghosts, the supernatural.  For him such matters are more benignly supernatural, though no one in their right mind would go into the swamp at night to contact the strange moving lights they glimpse.  In movies evil is often incarnated in such mysteries, which we label “sci-fi,” or horror or thrillers and -- for some reason -- pay to see.  The scariest feature evil coming right out of our bodies:  Alien spawn and Rosemary’s baby.  They mess with our identity.

For indigenous cultures the “trickster” walks both sides, about as much ridiculous as evil.  So that the atrocity of death hinges on whether a turd will float (in the Blackfeet foundation myth Old Man and Old Woman bet each other on a buffalo chip thrown into the river) and painful wounds are interpreted by talking anuses.  Propriety, proper behavior, is meant to help people to survive and scaring them into it as children is a necessary social control.   But there is always the amelioration of humor, deception, jokes.  Maybe now we’re talking about “clowns” in SW tribal ceremonies.

White Euros use North American icons of both virtue and evil in the same as they did the indigenous cultures of Europe/Africa, along a continuum from scary stories to consuming horror.  I don’t know enough about the material cultures of Asia to comment, but the Vietnam was deeply embedded in the American consciousness as evil because of the experience of soldiers there.  Quite interesting to consider is the American consciousness of Euro culture as both “good” and “evil.”  The Holocaust never loses its brutal force.  The Inquisition is a little out of fashion,  but images of rich, dissipated corruption spring up, alongside it the reacting Puritanical winnowing of the guillotine and the gibbet.  Maybe the images of someone like Pasolini, excessive wealth, much sex and excrement, echo old fears of plague.

For the prairie people life was mostly good, so long as they cooperated with each other.  The buffalo were such a generous and nourishing source of life that they never wanted to go back to the starvation scarcity of brush and ice farther north and east.  Taken as a whole, the band of semi-related and compatible people became a creature in itself that could protect against most things except ghosts of wronged people, grizzlies and lightning.  Much of it has been forgotten or overlaid with modern ideas.  But when the skeletons of Blackfeet that had been collected by museums and then lay for centuries in drawers, waiting for some undefined purpose, were returned to the rez as a gesture of good will and restoration, there were some among the oldest people who would have nothing to do with it.  They were afraid that the bone people would be angry for their treatment and exact some kind of vengeance.

This is the most incoherent of my posts about artifacts because I don't think about this side of them very much.  Chicken feet and toadskins on my doorstep only get broomed off.  Of course, to those who are devoted to the power of being "bad," this is a wicked attitude.

ARTIFACT SPOILERS

The most common way to destroy value in an artifact is to remove it from its context, whether that is a ruin or a living community, because it strips away some of the information as well as what I like to call “juju,” the valorized quality that some call “spiritual.”  (Spiritual is an abused and commodified term.)  The remains of an ancient settlement in the Middle East was found, evidently a pottery-making center since it was surrounded by shards of pots scattered out on the ground.  One could find various styles of construction and decoration.  Careful (one might even say obsessive) mapping of these shards that came from different periods was done by putting up a string grid and counting every fragment no matter how small.  This showed many useful patterns in the development of the community.  But to anyone not so gimlet-eyed or analytically-minded, this was a place that just had a lot of debris scattered around, valueless and meaningless.

People who find an untouched pueblo full of beautiful intact pots, can hardly force themselves to leave things alone, but if they want to preserve the scientific value, they must.  Maybe they are more valuing of possession or even money.  The problem is both educational and moral.

Consider the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning as a kind of guide.  There have been a number of problematic developments undertaken in good faith, partly because of several conflicting understandings of what the institution should be.  In the beginning the museum was built and provided with exhibits by the Indian Craft Board with the encouragement of John Ewers, a Ph.D. anthropologist connected to the Smithsonian in Washington DC.  Much monetary help came from the Lions.  The concept was that the exhibits would provide information and education about Blackfeet material culture so that “modern” Blackfeet could create new versions of the old material culture to sell.  The model in mind was that of Appalachian quilters.

So the exhibits themselves were meant to be examples of beautiful things to copy, a kind of reference library.  Some formally holy objects were included: elegantly beaded peyote fans and elaborate Thunder Pipe decorated calumets.  The emphasis was on the 19th century, when the legitimate religious nature of Native American objects was not considered nor would have been understood if it were.  Still on the books was a law against performing the religious ceremonies of American Indians, though it was no longer enforced.

The workroom included a circle of tables with drawers at each place so that people could work there together and store what they were doing in the drawers when they weren’t present.  As it turned out, they preferred to work at home -- might need to in order to take care of children or oldsters -- and many were individualists who didn’t want to be copied or critiqued.  Conformity turned out not to be a high value.  There were also storage cabinets for materials and an office (I think) for an overseer, so the hierarchical patterns of a business persisted, like attempts to dictate how things should be made, what materials and styles should be used.

A small shop was presumably where the crafts products could be sold.  It was discovered that generic popular ideas about what Indian goods “were” meant that Navajo silver and turquoise jewelry sold better than, say, authentic parfleches.  Again, an education problem.

Upstairs, guarded nowadays, is a library and offices for management.  the library needs to be guarded after two kinds of raids:  one was an actual bureaucratic purging of all white people files in a Red-Chinese-youth moment -- the material was taken to the dump where bemused folks rescued some of it: accounts and photos of Charlie Russell, Frank Bird Linderman, James Willard Schultz, George Bird Grinnell -- all white men who wrote about Blackfeet.  The other worry was that similarly motivated tribesmen might come to pour blood or otherwise destroy the files as “white man’s colonial records.”  (I’m not sure that ever happened.)  This has led to the bizarre circumstance of a Ph.D. anthro student coming with her U of Montana professor to do some research and discovering that the student (a mature enrolled Blackfeet woman married to a professor) was barred while her white (male) professor was admitted.

The museum complex also included from the beginning a small home for the resident professor/anthropologist who was expected to treat the position as both a curatorial assignment and field research station, continuing to interview and analyze.  John Ewers, as founder, was the first.  Then Tom Kehoe, soon joined by his wife, Alice Kehoe, and then Claude Schaffer, whose papers are now with the Glenbow Museum in Calgary along with the papers of Clark Wissler, the earliest of Blackfeet anthropological researchers.  The first genetically Indian anthropologist was  Raymon Gonyea, Onondaga, who continued on to the Eiteljorg, a far more prestigious and wealthy private institution.  Their written work is both context for objects and also count, in themselves, as artifacts.  But this was not seen.

An early blunder came from the local people, nice middle-class Indians, saying, “Oh, the clothes in the life-sized mannequin diorama look old and shabby.  Let’s fix them.”  So they did: cleaning, repairing, replacing.  At that point they had destroyed the scientific value since the material was original.  (There was no professional anthro at the time.)  But it was natural for people who were engaged in making replicas. 

A second blunder, which was actually a long-standing and pre-existing blunder, was building the museum in the flood plain of Willow Creek, so that the basement storage was invaded by water in the Flood of 1964 and part of the foundation was collapsed.  One of the confusions about the “museum” was that it would be a safe depository for the belongings of people who either donated or kept title to them.  Over and over tribal materials once held in temperature-controlled, humidity-controlled circumstances in well-funded museums are surrendered to tribes who have no way to protect them.  In this case it was thought that because the complex was called a “museum,” it would have the facilities to guard the vulnerable materials, but it did not.  Another crucial feature of a museum focused on collection should be closely monitored inventory and loan control of the exhibits, but rumors abound that things mysteriously disappear and no one knows where they went.  

The government (the BIA, Craft Board or whoever is holding the reins now) find the museum too expensive to operate and wish to close it down.  Everyone immediately objected, not least because it is a feature that brings tourists to town.  The government offered to give it to the tribe, but they couldn’t afford it either.  At least the controversy brought some attention and the grounds were improved with the addition of various features. 

“Artifact spoilers” are often seen as only the thieves, artifact fakers, slippery dealers, conscienceless customers who are looking for trophies, clueless ones who want interior decoration, or popularizers who exaggerate something valid and authentic into a Disney/Hallmark gizmo.  But getting too stringently political about “correctly” making and selling artifacts will cut off the possibility of using the people’s skills to help themselves.

THE SACRED OBJECT

My D. Min thesis was never completed or submitted because my advisors could not understand it and, indeed, some of the elements were still not clear in my own mind, and a few were only beginning to develop in the larger culture.  In 1982 some of the necessary components were missing.  For instance, fMRI had not been invented.

The first element was the power of sense memories, which I had learned in acting classes from Alvina Krause.  They call this “The Method.”

The second was Mircea Eliade’s understanding that introspectively one can “feel” the difference between sacred and profane, both in terms of locations (which are, after all, sense memories) and in terms of objects. (To me, sounds and smells can be sensory “objects.”).  

The third was Robert Schrieter’s insistence that meaning and sacrality are immanent, welling up out of the lives of people, and cannot be taken from one context to another without changing their meaning unless their deep roots are understood.  This was especially striking since Schreiter (CPPS) is a priest pondering the Substances of Communion. 

A fourth is something recent:  the physical evidence of how the brain works when it is operating in “sacred” mode.  Different areas “light up” on monitoring equipment.  Something really happens that is not imaginary, which assertion still doesn’t answer the unanswerable question of what the world is outside of our sensory engagement with it.  People insist passionately on the reality of some things only they can see.  We can prove that they are “seeing” something, but not reach what it is.

Another element is something I avoided but others do not: perception-altering drugs, most specifically LSD, peyote, and atahuasca.  I am not qualified to say anything about them, but to some people these substances are “sacred objects” or the means to perceive “sacred objects”.  These drugs, in their origins, tend to be used in ritual ways, often with a guide.  

What I realized was that the sacredness of objects has many sources, only one of which is the identification of the specific physical “thing.”  I will say that a sacred object is one which has the power to alter the consciousness of those who value it and use it in the context of their understanding.  I’m not just talking drugs, but also holy objects.  That is, the valorization is partly in the culture, partly in the experience of the individual, partly in the nature of the object, and partly in its ritualized use.

My thinking is much guided by my own experience in the Sixties as a Bundle Keeper, which was not something I initiated.  Bob Scriver “had the dream” telling him to acquire a Sacred Thunder Pipe Bundle (see my biography of Bob, “Bronze Inside and Out,” for particulars), but he had it while sleeping up against me.  I was entirely open to it but it didn’t mean to me what it meant to him.

Nor did it mean to Bob what it meant to the old-time circle of Bundle Keepers who maintained the ceremony below everyone’s radar, even local Blackfeet.  And again it did not mean to those old-timers what it had meant to the earliest Bundle Keepers in the 18th century, nor did it mean what it means today to the genetic descendants of those old-timers.  Each kind of Keeper had different assumptions and associations that were kindled by the experience of handling those normally hidden objects in ritually patterned ways.

Many people see the Bundle and its contents as valuable in themselves, but even a diamond only has ascribed human value.  These wrapped-up birds and mammals, this elaborately decorated pipe stem, even the things one does in certain ways, emerge from life on the prairie at ground level -- a floor of trampled-down grass under the lodge, paths guided by landmarks or traces in the dust, foods drawn from the land either as roots dug up or grass made into buffalo by steady grazing.  If a person doesn’t have that sensory context of meaning -- and I don’t mean driving by in a car or reading about it in a book -- then the object cannot be valorized in the old way.

A Bundle can be valorized as an object of veneration, the way the Catholic church treasures the bones of saints or splinters of the cross.  That’s not the same thing.  When modern grandchildren of the old-timers open their Bundles, much of their feeling of doing something sacred comes from their feelings about their grandparents and old memories of playing around the circle of singers while the ceremony was proceeding.  Maybe their faces were painted, according to old band traditions by people they knew.  The family bands are no longer in existence.  The families themselves are diluted now, as fractionated as the land ownership.

An anthropologist can say,  “Oh, this means this and that means that.”  But it will be derived from thought or asking informants rather than a deep re-experiencing of sense memories.  This is what people try to get at by saying a sacred object is “dead,” as though it were an animal.  The question then is whether it can be “re-valorized” and of course it can.  But it will be different, with a different value.

A strange phenomenon of the Sixties and Seventies was people who had no real connection to the Blackfeet place or lives, much less history, coming onto the reservation and wanting to participate in ceremonies.  Partly it was old left-over Brit drive to explore and colonize as signs of privilege and enlightenment.  Sometimes it was an earnest seeking for enlightenment.  Most of the time it was a big nuisance.

I remember the first time a stoned hippie showed up dancing wildly at Indian Days, thrashing branches around in all directions.  (They say gorillas do that to impress the others.)  Then there was the market in sacred objects that soon developed, wrapping the original bundles in many more layers of “information” about what they were, what they were worth, what they meant, how rare they were, how privileged a person would be if they bought one.

Pretty soon there was a backlash -- this is part of the post-modern point of view that Cliffords doesn’t address because it was so new in the 1980’s -- that only Indians should own their sacred objects and the bones of their ancestors and eagle feathers.  That only they should know the privileged information and write it up or talk about it for profit.  It was a bit of a problem that most of the earliest information had been “collected” in terms of objects and written information by white men because Indians were an oral culture.  And then there was the difficulty that storytelling per se is also patterned and assigned to specific times of the year or ceremonial circumstances.  (Books can be opened anytime.)  These new people wanted to “participate” by creating medicine wheels or re-arranging the existing ones.  They wanted to go make dream beds and see if they could have a vision.  Some of them began to create artifacts, esp. in Germany, working meticulously to be accurate and authentic until the only way to prove they were replicas was by carbon dating or genome analysis -- some kind of highly technical and expensive testing.  To them it was the object that was important.

By now the question of which Native American objects are sacred is very much muddled and the politics -- to say nothing of the profits -- are so intense that one hardly dares mention the subject.  The courts are hard-pressed to sort things out.  People commit suicide.  But I remain convinced of my original insights:  that something sacred can be felt as sacred (almost like a radiation); that this feeling is visible in the brain if one is looking with an fMRI; that the holiness and meaning arises from the time/place and the ecology unfolding from it; and that it does not reside simply in the object, which is far too easy to commodify.

HOW ARE WE TO THINK OF NATIVE AMERICAN OBJECTS? (A Series)

NOTES from “The Predicament of Culture” by James Clifford, Chapter 10:  “On Collecting Art and Culture.”

This is the “quadrant on quadrant” Clifford was using as a thought-help.  One set of two perpendicular continuums is between the “masterpiece” and the “artifact” and the other is between authentic and inauthentic.  So these two crossed continuums are about the objects themselves, whether they are “just” an object or something created intentionally with high skill and whether they are authentic (which seems to mean something like whether they developed out of the real lives of a specific culture) versus whether they are just some kind of imitation replica. 

Then the outside quadrant is about the judgment of these objects, how they are seen, with the expert connoisseur at one end and the fakers at the other end, and along the perpendicular continuum those who seriously study material culture versus those who just churn out tourist curios.

So if you picked up something in the ruins of an ancient civilization (which probably makes it authentic), if it were very skillfully made (a “high” example) that would be part of its value.  But the way it was judged by people who deal with such things, curators or dealers, would also control part of the value.  At some points in history or geography, found or otherwise field-acquired objects as a category are highly valued but at other points they are scoffed at.  What seems to be merely another spear head might turn out to be an example of a rare technology indicating a unique society.  What is common on the ground in the American SW, say pots, might be sold for a lot of money in France.

Clifford says his chapter will deal with four “loosely related” aspects of these situations.  

1. The “art-culture system” as it has developed over the past centuries, how it has sorted objects into taxonomies (the great 19th century preoccupation), and been affected by politics (the post-modern issues -- but he’s writing too early to describe them).
2.   The cultural description of objects as a form of collecting, so the objects are only points of reference for the writing which is a library.
3.   The claim that objects from historical or distant places carry abstract artistic values that can be used in modern works.
4.   The personal “juju” a person gets from owning something.  I’m going to leave this for Sunday.

Let’s see whether I can invent some examples of the first three, to see if I can really grasp what Clifford says.

ONE:  The art-culture system has been a tension between humanities and science, but an enmeshed tension, like a lover’s quarrel.  An example of tanning or beading might be an aesthetic issue -- how beautiful -- or it might be a scientific issue: how to classify the beading style, how rubbing brains into a hide will preserve it, what the trade routes for beads were.  

Many early objects were not only utilitarian but also “superstitious,” like the belief that moving a kachina will affect the weather or saying a rosary will be protective.  There are “folk” uses of objects.  Whether or not a specific kachina or rosary is valuable as an object will depend on who made it, when and where, with what amount of skill.  These things might be carelessly or seriously made, of superior or ersatz materials.  The fact of what they “are” becomes secondary.  

So on this dimension it is the expertise brought to bear on the object that validates it.  A rosary that was kicking around in a grandmother’s bureau drawer might turn out to be a mass-produced string of cheap glass beads or it might turn out to be something ancient, made of semi-precious stones, and associated with major historical trends or events or persons.  That still neglects the “use” of the beads as a mnemonic device for patterned prayer, which is the real point of the object.  Most people do not have this knowledge or even think of using experts, but if they did, they would go to museums to find experts.

Long ago I was in a production of “Caesar and Cleopatra,” the George Bernard Shaw version.  (Paula Ragusa AKA Paula Prentiss) was Cleopatra.  The cast wished to give a gift to the director, Alvina Krause, so they gave me their collection of money and sent me down to the Chicago loop to find a bust of Cleo.   Fool that I was, I bought the biggest, brightest one I could find,.  I should have opted for a small, fine version, but I didn’t know any better.  It never occurred to me what “fine” might mean so I went for size.  I had a child’s value system.

The equivalent in the art scene might be the fad for multi-colored patinas or painting on black velvet.  So “God’s Eyes” and “Dream-Catchers” are sold by the ton, most of them totally unlike anything authentic enough to interest an anthropologist.  People like the idea and then buy the design that will fit their interior decoration.  Big bright ones to fill up the wall.  To experts, they have no value at all and are not even Native American.

TWO:  Ray Djuff sends me the news that old Blackfeet census rolls are for sale on a CD on eBay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Blackfeet-Agency-Indian-Census-Rolls-1890-1906-/130483647118?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1e616e728e

Ray says:  “Not to worry if someone doesn’t win the auction, as the guy also has a website where he sells the CDs. I’ve got a copy of this and for anyone who doesn’t have access to the microfilm, it’s a useful thing to be able to have on hand.  The CD covers 1890 to 1906, which is perfect for those looking for information before the 1907-08 census for the allotments, the book of which I believe is still available at the Museum of the Plains Indian.”   This is an object (a list or CD) that is valuable only because it contains information, which might be useful for those looking for the provenance of objects and so on.

THREE:  So now we come to what I think of as the Picasso effect.  When museums began to collect “primitive” art and masks, with their spooky, exaggerated, other-worldly aspects, the Paris artists declared them brilliant, from the child-heart of the uncorrupted, and echoed them in their art.  This taught people to see objects with new eyes, and eventually led to the idea that even industrial manufacturing can create pleasing shapes:  what is the difference between the subtle organic shape of a clam and the smooth vitreous curves of a urinal?  Aren’t they triggering something in us that is a similar response to form?  Does this mock the essentials of art or lift up ordinary objects in our lives?  So often a joke like Duchamp’s (entering an upside-down urinal in a juried art show) carries real meaning.

FOUR:  There are several ways to look at what Eliade called “valorization” of objects  but I’ll wait until tomorrow.