Wild Rice wars: curating from a different place

Since last May, I have been curating for the Pitt Rivers Museum from a very different place. I am now based in Canada, and respectfully acknowledge that my home is on the treaty and traditional territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg near Nogojiwanong (Peterborough), in Ontario. Territorial acknowledgements such as this are common at universities, museums and government offices. They are used to open meetings and conferences, to greet and orient visitors to museums, to remind people that Canada is in the fraught process of trying to acknowledge and do something about its colonial heritage.

Wild rice in winnowing tray. Image from Black Duck Wild Rice.

This really is a fraught process. Last weekend, 300 people crowded into a local hall near my home for an acrimonious meeting called by a local association of second home owners. They are irate that an Anishinaabe man has been seeding wild rice on their lake and harvesting it with commercial equipment. The expanded rice beds clog the waterways for motor boats and have changed the clear, rocky waterscapes familiar to and beloved by cottage owners. Wild rice, manomin, is an ancient staple of Anishinaabe diet but rights to harvest it have been unclear under historical treaties and contested by settlers. The rice harvest, just finished, has raised these disputes again. Tensions have been very high over the past decade in this region about the wild rice issue, so much so that the issue has been described as a war in some media. Anishinaabe author Drew Hayden Taylor has written a play, now touring with a major Canadian company, called “Cottagers and Indians” about the issue. The “Save Pigeon Lake” website, put up by cottage owners, is uncompromising in its demand for the removal of the rice beds and cessation of Indigenous harvesting. 

Pitt Rivers Museum 1939.6.9.1,2.

So what do we do in the UK with collections that reference such local political tensions? The Pitt Rivers Museum holds a wooden mortar and pestle (accession number 1939.6.9.1,2) collected by staff anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood in 1939 in Minnesota. Someone has written the word “potogan” on one side of the mortar: boodaagan, the Ojibwe (Anishinaabemowin) word meaning a mortar for wild rice. The tools are not polished, not finely made, but are smoothed with use. They’re not especially beautiful or decorative. They’re powerful, though, speaking to long traditions of harvestingmanomin, and to the politics of resource use around the Great Lakes. The meeting near my new home is just the latest manifestation of such settler colonial attempts to control and eliminate Indigenous peoples, another long tradition experienced by Anishinaabe people.

As the equivalent of territorial acknowledgement, could museums in the UK (and in Canada) acknowledge colonial histories and their legacies, the struggles around the materials museums display? Saying ‘Ojibwa,’ ‘wild rice mortar and pestle,’ ‘wood,’ ‘collected by Beatrice Blackwood’ doesn’t seem enough. Such language denies history and politics and the roles of museums within these. Perhaps we could say, ‘Mortar and pestle for processing wild rice (manomin), Ojibwe (Anishinaabeg) people, Minnesota. Collected by Beatrice Blackwood, 1939. Settlement and treaties with British, Canadian and American governments have made it difficult to harvest this nutritious traditional food today.’ Even something as simple as a single contextual sentence in a label is key to shifting historical collections into the space of ongoing community ties, politics, and meanings.

On the Kawarthas wild rice controversy, see:

Clifford Skarstedt, https://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/news-story/9004961-more-than-300-attend-public-meeting-over-concerns-about-wild-rice-planting-in-the-kawartha-lakes/, 4 November 2018.

http://savepigeonlake.com/

http://www.selwyntownship.ca/en/townshiphall/resources/2016/Council-Agenda-January-26-2016-Tri-Council/2.-c-Williams-Treaties-and-Wild-Rice.pdf

Drew Hayden Taylor, https://nowtoronto.com/news/wild-rice-fight-cottagers-versus-indians/, 1 November 2015.

Material culture, politics, museums, and a Royal visit to Haida Gwaii

Photograph: Richard Lam, Vancouver Sun (reposted from The Province).

I greatly admire the respectful and diplomatic way in which the Haida nation recently hosted the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. In accordance with ancient Haida protocol, Haida people showed tremendous respect to their honoured guests. Haida teams made facilities secure, prepared activities and decorations, registered and transported local guests, and paddled the royal couple to the beach at Kaay Llnagaay, the Haida Heritage Centre, where they were welcomed ashore by Chief Gaahlaay and Haida Nation president Peter Lantin. Their guests were treated to Haida song and dance, a local food feast, and given mantles woven in Naaxiin style and trimmed with sea otter fur. They were also given a copper, a symbol of family honour and wealth, made by Gwaliga Hart. Everywhere that day there was regalia with clan crests, Haida hats, masks, material symbols of Haida heritage and identity.

There were also T-shirts. Many of those button blankets were worn over bright blue T-shirts with the slogan NO LNG, a reference to Haida protests over pipelines and tankers threatening pristine marine environments. Lisa Hageman, who wove the exquisite Naaxiin mantles given to the Duke and Duchess, emphasized the Haida role as guardians of lands, forests and waters in her design of the mantles by adding blue and green to the traditional pattern ‘All Our Ancestors.’ Such quiet but visible and determined articulation of principles and issues has a special power in situations when the Crown is represented in Aboriginal communities. All of these statements were made respectfully in the presence of high-ranking guests within the unceded territory of Haida Gwaii. Perhaps the most powerful challenge made was the gift of the copper, which invites reflection on the honour of the family bearing it.

Museums don’t often collect T-shirts with Indigenous protest slogans. They have collected coppers, masks, button blankets, woven hats, but seldom make the connection between these and the T-shirts. Culture and identity are tied to environment. Environmental degradation through oil spills and LNG leaks and fracking means for peoples like the Haida a loss not only of food but of time spent on the land and then a loss of stories, of knowledge, of language, of how to make and use cultural items: a dramatic erosion of identity and culture. Museums need to acknowledge and support such links between contemporary political protest and heritage items in collections and in communities.

I offer tremendous respect to the matriarchs, hereditary chiefs, leaders, artists and many others who facilitated this extraordinary event. It was wonderful to see so many people in the photographs with whom Pitt Rivers Museum staff have been able to work over the years. We look forward to continuing to work together.

Council of the Haida Nation posts on the visit are at: https://haidanation.wordpress.com

Challenging Comments

A recent comment in the visitor book for the Blackfoot Shirts Project exhibition asked:

Question: ‘scalplock’ is used regarding these shirts but it is nowhere explained beyond the fact that some of the fringe hair is human. Is this hair from the honoured warrior or the scalps of his victims? Why aren’t we told in a straightforward manner? And if these locks are from scalps taken, as your coyness suggests, what will you do when future DNA or other tests shows who these victims are and their descendants come wanting human remains returned. Are you just focusing on ‘lost’ Blackfoot cultural heritage whitewashed for modern tastes for promotion of your project? And how might you compare this with Nazi ‘handcrafts’ with Jewish body parts.’

Beneath this comment is written in another handwriting: GOOD COMMENTS THAT DESERVE ANSWERS.

So: I’ll try to answer.

Who did the scalplocks come from, and under what circumstances? Blackfoot elders were clear that the scalplocks came from from the scalps of victims in warfare. Across the nineteenth century, Blackfoot men defended their territory through warfare, and were encouraged to engage in warfare—including scalping—to demonstrate their courage and power.

In other northern Plains societies, however, senior warriors sometimes gave a lock of hair to a man when he made his war shirt.

DNA tests: Many people have asked us whether we can identify what group the hairlocks come from through DNA testing. DNA testing isn’t as specific as it seems when you watch forensic crime programmes on television, though. The age of a sample can degrade the quality of DNA used for analysis, as can other factors. The hair root yields far better results than the hair shaft, and the hairlocks on the shirts do not have roots on them because they were cut. Most labs don’t do DNA analysis without the hair root. Even with the root, there’s only a 60-70% chance of extracting complete DNA samples, and even when you get a sample, you are generally working with mitochondrial DNA which will tell you a maternal line of descent. Given that women were either exchanged between Plains groups for alliance-making, or often stolen during warfare, a maternal line of descent may not be very helpful to tell us which tribal group a sample comes from…[1]

So it isn’t that simple.

Human remains: Yes, hair on museum objects such as the shirts is indeed human remains. That is part of the reason we have treated the shirts with the greatest respect and tried to interpret them for visitors.

Are you just focusing on ‘lost’ Blackfoot cultural heritage whitewashed for modern tastes for promotion of your project: Blackfoot cultural heritage isn’t lost by any means. Blackfoot and Blackfeet people have, across their communities, a thriving traditional spiritual system, relatively strong language retention rates, and a sense of distinctive identity. Nevertheless, like most Indigenous people, they are concerned at the effects of assimilation policies on culture and cultural identity and are still retrieving many practices that were packed away or went dormant for many years.  In this context, the Blackfoot Shirts Project was initiated by senior Blackfoot ceremonialists who asked to bring the shirts home for a visit so that people could learn from them. What we are doing in the Oxford exhibition phase of the project is sharing the process and results of the project with audiences here: showing what happens, and that all of us benefit, from such work.

How might you compare this with Nazi ‘handcrafts’ with Jewish body parts: I wouldn’t make this comparison. It is true that all human societies have ways of using the bodies of captured or defeated enemies, but the similarity ends there. Scalplocks were produced in conditions of warfare between northern Plains peoples and between Plains peoples and Europeans. Such items were considered powerful and were deeply embedded in northern Plains cultures; within these cultures, the taking and display of scalplocks was understood and expected. Nazi works incorporating human body parts were deliberate attempts to humiliate persons who were not considered human, and were produced under widespread conditions of coercion: the contexts were very different.

This comment, like the others, however, makes us consider the cross-cultural nature of exhibitions such as Visiting with the Ancestors. It’s a reminder that not all meanings cross cultural boundaries and that we may need to really think about the underlying meanings of cultural practices to explain them—and that we all bring cultural baggage to such exhibitions. I thank our visitors for raising such challenging questions, as well as for the widespread and very strong appreciation they have expressed about the exhibition.

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[1] See, for instance:  http://www.forensicmag.com/articles/2013/04/challenges-dna-testing-and-forensic-analysis-hair-samples#.Uda3_hahD8s