Powerful Things: a graduate seminar in museum anthropology

I’m really excited to teach my graduate seminar this term. We are focusing on 3 spectacular items of Indigenous heritage, with discussion sessions around those, and working with two different communities to answer their questions about the items we are examining. This should be fun: I am asking all 12 students to turn their keen eyes, minds, sharp pencils and cameras toward these items. This is the first time I have linked student engagements with material culture and community questions, but it seemed a really good way to answer some research questions that came in from one community about one of the items we’ll be looking at. 

[And it's 12 students because that's all I can fit in the research room!]

We are starting with Powhatan’s Mantle at the Ashmolean, which we will examine in its case, but it is an ancient and powerful object to help us develop a material and visual research strategy for the items we are looking at out of case, and to begin to think with objects. This item came from Pocahantas’ father Powhatan c.1630s, during the early diplomatic negotiations between English settlers and Indigenous peoples on the east coast.

Then we’ll go on to look at two items in the research room (ie not behind glass):

A hide Plateau dress, collected by Sir George Simpson and his secretary Edward Hopkins of the HBC in 1841 [PRM 1893.67.7]. Kalispel tribal member Annette Pierre has been liaising with community members to compile their questions for our study of this dress.

And

A woven Chilkat apron, probably Tsimshian, possibly Tlingit [PRM 1884.56.82]. We know nothing about the provenance of this apron, but it was in Pitt Rivers’ personal collection by 1877.  A version of this apron was made by Dolores Churchill while she was studying with Cheryl Samuel, and Dolores Churchill, and Dolores and her daughter Evelyn Vanderhoop are kindly contributing questions and thoughts to our study.

PRM 1884.86.52

Both study sessions will result in extensive documentary records, photographs and sketches, and ‘mapped’ photo-shopped detailed images of the items (visual condition reports) which will be made available publically, online as well as through Indigenous community networks.

In between, we’ll be discussing the changing meanings and roles of material and visual culture across time and cultures, focusing on the social and political roles of heritage items today as Indigenous societies strengthen distinct identities in postcolonial contexts through re-engagements with material and visual heritage. We’ll be thinking about issues of hybridity, cultural change and persistence, heritage, postmemory and sensory engagements with heritage items in the legacy of trauma, and Indigenous survivance.

Very glad as always to have the excellent Giovanna Vitelli along for the course! It will be really challenging, fun, and productive.

Captain Franklin’s moccasin: many mysteries solved!

Captain Franklin’s moccasin: many mysteries solved!

So, back to the mysteries of the moccasin…There are far more clues with this object than are normally found with museum collections! One of the best is a note from the donor in the Museum’s “related documents file” for the collection. The RDF, as it is known in the Museum, is where we put all the correspondence related to acquiring objects and any bits and bobs of notes that come in with objects. The RDF for the moccasin includes a handwritten note by someone in the donor’s family:

"4 shoes, knife set, 2 chop sticks? bone implements, money maps etc bought by Mother at Gawdy Hall sale 1938-9? Some or all are connected with the Franklin expedition Esquimo"

Really, you don’t get much better than this in museum research!

We know that the moccasin was given by Frances Griffin to Mary Ann Gilbert, her aunt by marriage. We also know, thanks to this note, that the moccasin was purchased at the sale at Gawdy Hall, and we know from research on the Gawdy Hall sale that it occurred in July 1938.

So how did the moccasin get from its second owner, Mary Ann Gilbert, to Gawdy Hall? 

Mary Ann Gilbert married Davies Giddy Gilbert in 1808. Their surviving children were John Davies Gilbert, who like his father became an important Fellow of the Royal Society and its president, and three daughters, Catherine, Anne, and Hester Elizabeth, cousins of the Griffin sisters.

More clues are found in a local history volume, Eastbourne Memories, by George F. Chambers (1910), a fine gossipy book which reads very much as an extended oral account of one man’s reminiscences. It contains a very helpful anecdote describing the author’s connection with the extended Gilbert family, including Hester—and Lady Franklin:

The East-Bourne house was occupied during many years by Mrs. Sancroft Holmes, Mr. J. D. Gilbert's widowed sister, and her son and four daughters. During that occupation I was a frequent visitor there and made the acquaintance of two ladies the widows of two men who had at the middle of the 19th Century occupied very prominent positions in the public eye, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth and Sir John Franklin. …Mrs. Holmes afterwards went to live in Norfolk, and died there in 1885. Her son, Mr. J. S. Holmes, is a landed proprietor in Norfolk, living at Gawdy Hall, near Harleston. (p14-15, italics mine)

So John Davies Gilbert’s sister Hester went on to be Mrs Sancroft Holmes, and lived after her widowhood with her children at the Davies Gilbert family home in Eastbourne, Gildredge Manor. Jane, Lady Franklin, visited her cousin there. And Hester, who was Mrs Sancroft Holmes, had close ties by marriage to Gawdy Hall. Doing a bit of research around these bits of information reveals that Hester married William Sancroft Holmes in 1840, and was widowed in 1849.

It was through cousin Hester’s marriage that the moccasin ended up in the Gawdy Hall sale. William Sancroft Holmes, her husband, was born there in 1815. George Chambers noted that Hester’s son, ‘Mr. J. S. Holmes, is a landed proprietor in Norfolk, living at Gawdy Hall, near Harleston,’ which would have been because he inherited it from his father. It makes perfect sense that he would have taken his widowed mother there with him in her old age. At some time during her married life, Hester took the moccasin to Gawdy Hall, where it entered the collections there before she died in 1885.

So after Frances’ gift of the moccasin to Mary Ann Gilbert, it came into the possession of Mary Ann’s daughter Hester. And sometime between then and Hester’s death in 1885, the moccasin must have passed to her son, who took it to his home, Gawdy Hall.

Hester’s husband William Sancroft Holmes had something of a collection, mostly of African weapons and other miscellaneous ethnographic objects. At some point he lent it briefly for a display—the location and purpose fo this is unknown, but it came back to Gawdy Hall with small handwritten labels. One of these now in the Museum’s RDF is written on the back of his calling card:

It didn’t stay there, though, because Gawdy Hall, everything in it, and the entire estate was sold at auction in July 1938. Hester and Wiliam’s son, John Sancroft Holmes, died in 1920; the Hall required extensive repair by then and the heirs decided it was too expensive. There’s an amazing auction bill for the sale at the English Heritage Archive, listing everything to be sold: Gawdy Hall and its gardens, glasshouses, and stables, three lodges near the Hall, 5 farms, four sets of cottages, and associated properties, were all sold at auction. It was there that the moccasin was purchased by the man who gave it to the Pitt Rivers Museum.

But how did the moccasin get to Captain John Franklin in the first place? Stay tuned…

Captain Franklin's moccasin: really?

There are amazingly evocative things in the PRM collections, and none less so than this single moccasin, 1997.19.27:

PRM 1997.19.27, Franklin's moccasn

It comes with the wonderful hand-written tag stitched into the wraparound upper that reads,

Brought by my Brother in law xxCaptn Franklin from the Esquimaux Country in 1827 and given to me F. Griffin

(xxSir John Franklin)

& by Miss Griffin given to Mr [possibly Mrs] Gilbert Nov’r 23rd 1828

Captain John Franklin, the Arctic explorer, no less! Over the next few weeks, I’m going to use this object as an example of the many paths one can pursue in material culture research. What does the object itself tell us? Is the Franklin provenance true? Who were F. Griffin and Mrs Gilbert? How did the moccasin get from ‘the Esquimaux Country’ to the Pitt Rivers Museum? What is it decorated with? Why is there just one, and not a pair, and why might that be significant?

Doing history with objects remains a challenge for the historian. Objects pull our attention toward certain things—their materiality, their decoration—and away from others: we have no idea who the woman was who made this moccasin, how Franklin obtained it (if indeed the tag is correct), or what the relationship between them was. We tend to focus on the specific, marvelous thing rather than the big picture of history. Let’s see if we can work in both directions, though, and find out more about this specific, marvelous thing and about how it might tell us things about the big picture of history that the historian’s usual sources—archival documents—don’t. There are all kinds of mysteries here, and the possibility for !EXCITING DISCOVERIES!, so stay tuned! First up: a ‘close read’ of the label sewn into the moccasin. Who were the mysterious F. Griffin, and Mr (or Mrs) Gilbert?