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.

SOTHEBY'S SELLS WARSHIRT FOR $2,658,500

The key story here is from http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=47506.  Art Daily and Art Journal are my most dependable sources of information about the arts and museum world.  They often include stories about artifacts and related fields like anthropology and paleontology.

These so-called warshirts are interesting to think about as art objects in terms of design, but also in terms of the niche they occupy among artifacts.  They are actually more like ceremonial shirts or parade shirts and might be accompanied by leggings, which in later years to reflect Euro tastes, might be matched in pattern and or colors.  Some shirts have detachable sleeves and/or open armpits, sort of like modern outdoor wear meant for heavy exertion, but useful if you're sitting on a horse in the sun waiting for a parade to start.  Like this small sculpture between Bob Scriver and I at the opening of the Whitney Gallery expansion of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in the Sixties:

Probably many people don't think about the use and antiquity of these often spectacular garments.  If they are decorated with glass beads, they are necessarily post-white contact.  Quill work would be the earlier version, but if the quills are dyed with something other than a local substance, they would be post-contact again.  I always liked the story of the woman in modern times who produced vivid quill work, using porkies picked up as roadkill along the highways.  Her dye source was a handful of crepe paper thrown into a pot of boiling quills.  The hide itself could also be colored with plants or minerals or fungus.  Bright yellow was a favored color.  Blue or green might suggest storms, thunder, magic, power.  White comes from deposits of kaolin in places where the white clay can also be made into pots. 

Sometimes they are made of coarse wool, red or navy blue, that also had to come with traders.  Many depictions of prairie Indians in the early days show long shirts ending above the knees and worn with only a breechclout, if that.  The length might be related to sort of hide used.  Women, of course, wore a longer version and probably not so fancy.  The strips of beading are usually worked separately and then sewn on.  Jessie Schultz, one of the later wives of James Willard Schultz, was instrumental in getting the Museum of the Plains Indian built in Browning, Montana, as a craft center for the creation of such garments to sell.  She insisted that Blackfeet always did geometric patterns while Cree did floral patterns.  I only know from experience that working with the small units of color that are beads, it's natural to create a geometric and possibly repetitious pattern, especially if working on a woven base.  But Cree floral near-embroidery on black velvet is quite different.

The long fringes are said to carry water off, dripping it.  In days before such attachments were for ornamental purposes, it would be easy to pull off a thong to tie things up.  Ermine (winter weasels, never summer hides) were attached to dangle and so were actual scalps, which probably led to the idea of war shirts, but they were often imitated with horse hair or just human hair, no scalp attached.

Several years ago I noticed these shirts were showing up in the Manitou Auction that accompanied the C.M. Russell Ad Club benefit auction in Great Falls in March.  The prices exceeded those of most of the paintings.  It's an open question whether planning and creating such a shirt would be more or less dependent on skill and persistence than a high quality painting.

Sotheby's Sets New Auction Record for American Indian Art with War Shirt that Sells for $2,658,500

Oglala Sioux Beaded and Fringed Hide War Shirt. Est. $250/250,000. Sold for: $2,658,500. Photo: Sotheby's.

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s set a new record for a piece of American Indian Art at auction when an Oglala Sioux Beaded and Fringed Hide War Shirt which once belonged to the famous and celebrated Sioux Chief, Black Bird sold to an anonymous buyer for $2,658,500 (est. $250/350,000). The War Shirt led the sale which totaled $4,809,503. This was comfortably over the high estimate and the highest ever total for a various owner sale in this category (overall est. $2.8/4 million). Two determined telephone bidders battled for several minutes before auctioneer Hugh Hildesley brought the hammer down. In addition to the provenance, the shirt is made all the more remarkable by the existence of photographs showing it being worn by its original owner. Photographic documentation of an artifact as important as the Oglala Sioux Shirt is very rare. In this case though, several images exist of Chief Black Bird wearing the shirt, providing an important insight to its history and to the life of the Chief who was one of the most documented Native Americans of his generation. End This photo is Shortie White Grass, head of the Buffalo Dung Band in 1899.  Shortie was a true warrior, but the intertribal warfare was mostly before 1880.  I do not know whether he actually wore this shirt into battle.  The photo was taken by Walter McClintock and is part of the Glacier National Park Archives.  It appears in William Farr's indispensable book of photos called "The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945." Bob Scriver used one of these shirts on the cover of "The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains."  His informant, probably John Hellson, told him that the ermine skins meant the man was a Medicine Bundle keeper and that the round pattern on the chest depicted the sun and the arrows he gave the people.  The oval spots with squiggly tails that are drawn directly on the hide are said by some to depict tadpoles, indicating water power, and by others to represent scalps, since this is supposed to be a war shirt.  Some early shirts have real scalps, or imitations made of horsehair or human hair, no skin attached. I count eight shirts and three full-suits in the collection.  Six belong to the "war shirt" genre and the others are simply buckskin shirts embellished with quills or beads.  Two of the suits were worn specifically by Bob Scriver, one made for him in the Thirties when he was the leader of the All-Indian band, and the other commissioned by him for ceremonial events in the Fifties.  (He was white, but also the school band teacher.)  I've been told that not all of these shirts and suits were retained by the Royal Alberta Museum, but when they were sent back across the border, they were intercepted by border officials who conveyed them to the Montana Historical Society, who "repatriated" them to well-placed members of the Blackfeet Tribe.  I have no confirmation of this, but it's pretty typical of how artifacts travel.

ARTIFACT COLLECTORS: UHLENBECK

Let’s try some local case studies before we go to the SW law cases which have not come to trial yet. I have a hunch that by tracing out some very different artifact collectors, we can uncover issues. Too many people reach a point of view by excluding any evidence that conflicts with it.

I want to start with the story of Professor Uhlenbeck, as recovered and published by Mary Eggermont-Molnar. (Darrell Kipp calls her my “Canadian cousin” because we are both quasi-academics who work with Blackfeet materials.) Mary E-M has a “congregation” of Dutch historians. She has been particularly valuable in promoting and actually DOING the translation of materials in European languages that are about Native Americans. These materials are very early because the Europe-based missionaries and empire-builders were the first contacts. Mary’s earlier book was “Montana: 1911,” (University of Calgary Press and University of Nebraska Press), the translation of Mrs. Uhlenbeck’s journal that summer. The second one, which has just recently been published is “C.C. Uhlenbeck (1866-1951): A Linguist Revisited.” (Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies, XXIX, ii/XXX,i (Fall 2008/Spring 2009)) Much of the latter is not in English. Mary is a contributor, rather than editor.

The Uhlenbecks, a rather elderly pair of Europeans, so focused on their work and innocent in their understanding of the Blackfeet, illustrate well some of the problems in passing judgment on collectors. Willie (Mrs.) Uhlenbeck, writing in the 1911 summer, remarked that in their walks they often came across weathered ridge-burials and felt they should not take anything even though the bodies in coffins were often exposed by the shattering of the coffins. (Fifty years later, in 1961, I would still come across traces of boards and bones.) The protection of the graves came mostly from the conviction of the tribal people that disturbers would be cursed. Indeed, many of those deaths were from smallpox, a durable germ. By the time of the Uhlenbeck’s the belongings might include elaborate and valuable objects: a chair made of buffalo horns, guns, or jewelry. Unbelieving youngsters and greedy outsiders did not hesitate to loot.

In the end, Willie confessed, they did take a bracelet that had been scattered apart from the main burial. They felt guilty and did not show their Indian friends. The Uhlenbecks saw but did not take skulls that were entirely fleshless, cleaned by insects, sun and wind into gleaming white bone. Such mementos mori are almost irresistible to frontiersmen’s dark humor, which was quite Shakespearean as well as often drunken. Many skulls ended up in bars, staring at the patrons. Plenty of more sophisticated folk had a skull on their mantel or desk.

What the Uhlenbecks were collecting was not material objects but the language -- though taking the language did not remove the language. In fact, Uhlenbeck’s work is one of the forces that has preserved the language to be studied in modern times. No Native American person of the time had the training to analyze and record these materials and most whites on the scene would have been happy to see the language vanish along with the people. It was the very issue of “vanishing” that attracted Professor Uhlenbeck to the work of preservation.

His methods, however, were interesting then to the local people and still interesting now, though we might long for video recordings of the proceedings. Living in a little tent provided by John Tatsey, furnished by their travel trunks and a few crates, plus an ingenious but cranky contraption of a camp bed that accommodated both of the couple, the professor paid informants to come and tell him stories in the Blackfeet language, providing translations as they went. All day he transcribed these onto paper. In the evening, after a meal provided by the Tatsey’s, curious Blackfeet came to listen while Uhlenbeck read the stories back to them as a check on accuracy and asked their opinions. They were amazed at this parlor trick since they had thought only English was susceptible to reading and writing! There was always much joking and merriment.

The Professor didn’t make money nor did he live in luxury. (His best luxury was his wife, who constantly worked to make him comfortable by brewing tea and heating stones in their little stove to wrap in rags to keep their feet warm at night.) But he did gain in prestige and the knowledge that his work had value, though it was sharply criticized by some in the field. Certainly this has got to be among the earliest written records of even provisional accuracy concerning the language. And yet, the descendants of Tatsey, perhaps empowered by watching what this man did, discredit written versions of Napi tales, insisting that their own versions, several generations down the line, are more authentic and real. For them, this is true. They also want money for the stories.

At one point there was a China-style Red Cultural Revolution in Browning that rejected all white contributions to knowledge about Blackfeet. Many valuable records and documents ended up at the dump, where a few people tried to save some of them. It was a vanishing done by themselves. This purge seemed to be necessary to clear out resentment that was blocking progress. At that time it was also considered “backward” if not simply “dangerous” to preserve the Blackfeet language, because it would cause a person to be punished in white society. Due mostly to the efforts of the Piegan Institute, this has reversed. (Tatseys helped with this.) In fact, the “impossible” (which many said teaching non-speakers would prove to be) turned out to be wrong. Now speaking Blackfeet is considered a major coup and obviously valuable cultural preservation. Uhlenbeck’s work is important again. These radical swings in popular sentiment do not help to stabilize legal status, much less preserve the materials in question.

Another issue invisible to local Blackfeet as well as whites is the scientific study of how the human mind forms language. One source of theories is the comparison of grammar in different languages to see what forms are universal and which are local. Many know about Whorf’s theories that the Hopi speak in gerunds (words ending in “ing”) which is a product of their understanding of the world as transient processes interacting. This striking notion has provoked philosophical theories and personal transformation. The realization that different languages are the product of different world-views is considered a major element of a good humanities education.

But another more suspicion-provoking use of material like Uhlenbeck’s studies is the deep-history tracing of relationships and development over time of population movement across the continent in a kind of DNA of “talk.” Until the conclusions are spat out at the end of the study, the process seems like another of those inscrutable “ours-to-know-because-you’re too dumb” things that people in ivory towers do. Hopefully a little diplomacy might prevent such problems. Willie Uhlenbeck, with her crate of hard candies, knew what Julie Andrews knew: “a spoonful of sugar makes the theories go down!”

The questions here are mostly related to gradients in the difference of education.