Detail, Blackfoot shirt 1893.67.1, Pitt Rivers Museum.
The membrane under the quill wrapping is visible in the centre of the image.
Today
I’m giving a talk to colleagues here at the Pitt Rivers Museum about the Blackfoot Shirts Project. Since most
of them have been part of the project—indeed in many ways it has been their
project more than mine, I just write the grants and give the occasional
shove—there actually isn’t much about it that they don’t know. So, I thought I
would talk about what we all learned from the project, in different ways.
For
those of you who haven’t been following this, the Blackfoot Shirts Project in a
nutshell is: a group of us brought 5 hide and quill and hairlock shirts,
collected in 1841, from Oxford back to museums in Blackfoot country, and invited
500 Blackfoot people to touch them. Not surprisingly, amazing things happened,
and we are still thinking about responses to the shirts. You can learn more
about the project at: http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/blackfootshirts/
So
what did we learn?
Firstly,
by spending a lot of time preparing the shirts for travel and then looking at
them closely with Blackfoot people, we learned about the shirts: that some of
the decorative material is not porcupine quill but bulrush, for instance. We
learned about paints and dyes (who knew that blue was from duck poop?). We
realized that the quill wrappings on the hairlocks are done over a foundation
of some kind of membrane which is slipped over the bundles of hair:
pericardium? Vein? We realized that there are the long-dead carcasses of nits
still clinging to the hairs. And we realized that the shirts’ histories, before
and after collection, are there to be seen: coal dust from the Hopkins’ home,
tack marks from being stuck to the walls, bits of red ochre on the inside from
contact with men painted for spiritual protection.
We
tend to see the surface of objects in museums. It’s only when you spend this
much time and energy really, really looking hard that you see beyond that, to
the processes of making and storing and displaying that make up an object’s
histories.
And
we learned that these are not ‘objects’: they are also material forms of
spirits, of those who made and used them, and those whose physical bodies are
present in the hides, sinew, quills and hair. For Blackfoot people, these are
ancestors, not museum specimens.
Having
learned this, we think differently about the shirts now that they are back at
PRM. We have a stronger sense of stewardship and of Blackfoot people as having
ties to the shirts: we feel accountable. We have realized that just because
objects enter museums, their lives don’t stop. They can go out and have
adventures. One of these very old, very rare, very fragile shirts was used in a
ceremony while we were in Alberta. We realized that it might have acquired some
sacred paint during the ceremony, and we decided that if that was the case, we
would not think of it as damage: it would be a mark of the shirt’s ongoing
life. For a museum, that’s learning quite a bit.
