Uneven consultation

Museum anthropologists always look for the politics in the relations between museums and indigenous peoples, the relations of power, what is unsaid as well as what is said. In the last few weeks, there have been several articles in Canadian media sources about B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s call for the return of objects to BC. The most recent ones [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/christy-clark-spoke-on-ancestral-remains-without-haida-input-curator/article30637521/] clarified that the Haida nation was not consulted about this call before it went out. The reason that the Haida Nation was deliberately excluded from Clark’s ‘consultation’ process on the repatriation issue is because Clark supports oil and gas development, and the Haida oppose it. Clark’s dramatic call for returns of heritage materials, and ‘consultation’ process, is a means of building an Aboriginal support base in BC despite her intent to proceed with oil and gas development that would permanently damage lands and resources on which Aboriginal people depend for survival. It might also be seen as an attempt to build a support base of non-Aboriginal people who would then dismiss Aboriginal concerns about energy and sovereignty (‘what else do they want? We’ve given them their stuff back!’).

The Haida Nation has the best track record for repatriation of all Aboriginal nations in Canada; they have brought home nearly 500 ancestral remains. They have done so in a thoughtful, respectful way that has enabled them to build constructive bridges with museums. Other Aboriginal nations, and the Province, would benefit from working with the Haida Repatriation Committee to discuss their experience (www.repatriation.ca). Museums and Indigenous peoples can work together productively around repatriation: as I have learned, largely from Haida people, everyone benefits from such relationships. Repatriation is necessary in many cases. Getting material heritage circulating through loans is also necessary: many Aboriginal communities don’t have facilities to care permanently for material heritage, but access can be provided in many ways. And whatever stance one might take on the oil/gas industry, access to heritage items is too important to Aboriginal survival to be caught up in this kind of political game.

If Premier Clark is serious about providing access to material heritage held in museums outside the country for Aboriginal peoples, I would invite her office to consider funding the first loan from UK museums to the Haida Gwaii Museum. There are important early historic collections of Haida material heritage in the UK, and we need to find a way to make them accessible to Haida people. To get rolling, this project will need between £15-20K to pay for standard loan fees (c.£6K to Haida Gwaii), a new case for the Haida Gwaii Museum that provides enhanced environmental controls and security for international loans, and time and costs for a museum staff member to stay for a few weeks and facilitate handling sessions out of case before placing the item on display. Once the program is up and running, it will be much less expensive to run. Objects can be rotated every few years and can provide access to the tens of thousands of B.C. Aboriginal artefacts in museums around the world, while strengthening relationships between those nations and museums to improve public interpretation. 

Everyone needs access to material heritage. Let’s find creative solutions that strengthen relationships in the process.

Visiting the Great Box at home

Haida Gwaii, July 2016. Photograph by Laura Peers.

When there are long-term, established relationships between museums and communities, grant-funded projects enable both partners to fulfil key goals, take things in new directions, and spend time together to renew and strengthen ties. The Great Box project is a wonderful example of this.

The Haida Nation and the Pitt Rivers Museum have worked together since 1998, and formalized their relationship in 2009 with the visit of a very large Haida delegation to PRM to work with all 301 Haida objects and establish permanent relationships around the collection for mutual benefit. In 2010, PRM returned an ancestral remain to Haida Gwaii. Artists have come to PRM each year to learn from the collections and to teach Museum staff. Educational programmes at PRM have benefited tremendously from input by Haida curators and artists over the years.

Gwaai and Jaalen asked to do the Great Box project to learn from the historic artist and take that knowledge home with the new version of the box. The new box was shipped home for completion in October 2014 and immediately sparked many conversations amongst artists. It was also used to teach box design to high school students, and a formal unveiling event was held for it at the Haida Gwaii Museum in March. It has been on display there since.

With support from the ESRC Knowledge Exchange Dialogues fund and Linacre College, I was able to visit the box at home in Haida Gwaii last month, and catch up with Jaalen, Gwaai and other Haida friends and colleagues. Jaalen and I did a presentation to community members in the inspiring Performance Space of the Kay Llnagaay HeritageCentre adjacent to the Haida Gwaii Museum. Many people made the hour-long drive from Masset to see the box again and to discuss what we had learned from the project.

Laura Peers (R) and Jaalen Edenshaw (at R by box) in discussion with community members about the
Great Box project, July 2015. Photograph by Geoff Horner.

I also worked with Nika Collison, curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum, to begin planning another series of projects that comes out of the Great Box: an exhibition and book about Haida traditions of box-making. Nika kindly asked many community members if they would talk to me about this and I spent much of my time on island having great discussions with extremely knowledgeable people, from senior artists to a man who makes bentwood box coffins for community members to a woman who brought box-making into a program for youth. Everyone was extremely supportive of taking the project into these directions, and we also talked about how to make the process most useful for Haida artists. We hope to find funding also to hold workshops associated with this next step in which people can view historic boxes, talk about what makes great box design, and actually make boxes. The project needs to fulfil community needs and goals to take the relationship forward. There are many ways such activities would also benefit both museums involved.

We also talked about the major implication to come ‘out of the box’ from the Great Box project: the need for more artists to have direct access to more historic treasures so that this scale and depth of knowledge repatriation can happen. That’s what I’ll talk about next.

Frank and the pipe

Curators who work with Indigenous communities find themselves in between contradictory expectations and needs from their museum colleagues and community members. This is never a comfortable place to be, but it can be a space for learning.

Museums assume that physical preservation is the key goal for collections. Access to collections is also a key goal, but ‘access’ is usually defined as exhibition [behind glass], or through online images and information [digital/visual access] is sufficient, enabling them to continue to privilege physical preservation of objects.

These forms of access are insufficient for many Indigenous communities, especially regarding sacred items. People need to touch items to reconnect with ancestral knowledge and to strengthen identity in the present. People need to pray with sacred items to strengthen communities in the present. When access is denied by museums to such items, communities call for repatriation.

Blackfoot people have worked tirelessly for decades now to repatriate sacred items for use in ceremonies. Pipes, sacred bundles, and many items have been recovered and are used and cared for. The ceremonies in which these items are used have been passed down even through the most difficult eras. A great deal of love and self-sacrifice goes into caring for sacred items: you have to behave respectfully around them, pray with them daily, run the home in which they are kept very carefully.

And these items give back to the community. Sick people are brought up to them to be blessed during ceremonies. People ask the spirits associated with sacred items for strength, for healing, for help. People who did not grow up speaking Blackfoot learn the language in order to participate in ceremonies and to care for sacred items properly. Young people who might get into teenage trouble choose to join the sacred societies and learn and practice traditional values and ways of life instead.

Many items used in Blackfoot ceremonies now have been repatriated from museums, and still have their museum accession numbers painted on them.  When I am able to attend ceremonies, I note these numbers with some amusement, and with a poignant sense of rightness: things are back in their right place, where they are understood and loved. These ceremonies are what the government and the churches tried to stamp out. The transfer of sacred items out of communities and into museums was part of that process of enforced assimilation. The transfer of such items back into community hands has been part of the healing process for Blackfoot people.

One time I was at a ceremony and the late Frank Weasel Head was assisting with it. At a certain point in the ceremony he came outside the tipi in which the ceremony was being conducted, holding a sacred pipe, to pray with it outdoors. The pipe looked to my curatorial eyes to be 18^th century: it was wrapped in long braids of porcupine quills and was one of the old, long-stemmed ones. Frank’s hands were covered in red paint, made of bison fat and red mineral ochre, for spiritual protection, which is part of Blackfoot ceremonies. For a moment, my curatorial self fretted: he’s getting paint and fat all over the quillwork! We’ll never be able to clean it! That’s an 18^th century pipe, it should be in a museum!

And then I saw the number painted on the side of the pipe. It had been in a museum. It had come home. Frank was using it for precisely what it had been made for. He was praying with it. He was praying really hard, begging for help for the sick people at the ceremony, thanking the Creator for life, thanking the beings who had brought us all together for the ceremony, asking for strength for everyone. Suddenly my mind shifted, and I understood that he was using the pipe with incredible respect and with tremendous love: that this was the right way to handle the pipe. The paint on the quillwork was evidence of that respect and love: it was not damage. It was very humbling. He was praying very intensely, and I didn’t think he saw me, which felt right, as I was a visitor and felt lucky just to be sitting on the outside edge of things. I didn’t want to distract him from important work for his own people.

After the ceremony, Frank sought me out. It had been a long day for him and he was very tired, but he marched up to me, grabbed me by the shoulders, shook me gently, and said: ‘Now do you understand why sometimes, some things have to come home?’ He had seen me, and he had seen that shift in my perception. I am grateful to him. I have never looked at museum objects in the same way since.

Every time I see things in the museum, I wonder whether the communities they come from have ever seen them since they left. I wonder how to bring things back together with the communities they came from, and think about how much might be achieved by doing so. They don't all have to leave the museum, and they don't have to leave forever. There are so many possibilities.

Loss of a mentor and great man

I’m very sad to announce the passing of Kainai ceremonial leader and elder, Frank Weasel Head, who has been a strong mentor to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Frank worked with us on the Kainai Photos Project, advising us as a member of the Mookaakin Cultural and Heritage Foundation. He helped Alison Brown and myself to work in a fully collaborative way with Kainai people so that the project served Kainai needs as well as the terms of the UK research council grant funding it—and he helped us to work out how to do that. Andy Blackwater and the late Narcisse Blood also played key roles in that project, ultimately leading to the signing of a Memorandum of Agreement between the Mookaakin Foundation and PRM. Along the way, Frank was always there to support us, teach us, and tease us.

Frank Weasel Head, Terran Kipp Last Gun wearing a replica shirt made by Sylvia
Weasel Head and Frank Weasel Head, and one of the ancestors [PRM 1893.67.2]

A few years later, we had a chance to bring both Frank and Andy to Oxford, and we showed them the Blackfoot shirts in the storage area. We pulled one shirt out of the storage drawer onto a table, and opened the drawer so they could see the others.

They touched the shirts gently in the drawer, feeling down through the layers, and realized how many there were, how old they were, their powerful presence. They fell silent for several minutes: I had never before seen Frank at a loss for words. Then they had a conversation in Blackfoot, and then we had a very interesting conversation about the shirt on the table, which they examined very closely.

The next day, Frank and Andy spoke to the staff and students of the Museum. As he explained his reaction to the shirts in his talk, Frank said: ‘You have five of these. I have never seen even one. My children have never seen one. My grandchildren have never seen one. And what are you going to do about that?’

Out of that moment the Blackfoot Shirts Project was born. Frank led that project in many ways, consulting with people in his community, helping us to establish how to work with Blackfoot sacred protocols and the shirts, encouraging us to attend ceremonies, mentoring us, teasing us ferociously, and saying hard things when needed. He was always there for us when we needed an interview or a quote. His extraordinarily gifted and polished style of speaking—direct, to the point, honest, and powerful—was effective in meetings and in exhibition quotes, and I always admired his ability to get to the point and solve problems.

Along the way, I came to have tremendous respect for Frank. For years, if I needed to speak to him, I had to catch him early in the morning before he left the house for a day’s meetings, committee work, or consulting: in ‘retirement’ he worked tirelessly for his community. I so enjoyed watching him at ceremonies, ensuring that everything was done right, encouraging younger ceremonialists, making sure that hesitant visitors like myself were brought in and had our faces painted for blessing. His arthritis meant that the long flights from Alberta to the UK left him in considerable physical discomfort, but he was always keen to come over and help, to work with staff and students. I am so grateful for that: he helped to teach a generation of museum professionals in the UK about community perspectives on heritage items in collections here. He helped to change museums here. I shall miss him terribly. On behalf of the Pitt Rivers Museum, I would like to express our sincere condolences to his wife Sylvia and to his extended family.

The (new) Great Box, home on Haida Gwaii!

We have just uploaded a wonderful video showing the new Great Box teaching, with Gwaai and Jaalen, in the high school at Masset on Haida Gwaii. It is wonderful to see that we have managed to bridge the historical, geographical and political distance between Masset and the Pitt Rivers Museum,  and that the box is once more active within Haida life. You can watch the video here:

Great Box - Masset Workshops from Pitt Rivers Museum on Vimeo.

And there will be an unveiling of the Great Box on 7 March at the Haida Gwaii Museum: poster below.

I wish I could be at the unveiling! This is such an exciting project and I am just so proud to be part of it. Looking forward to catching up with the box later this spring, though.

Narcisse Blood

Narcisse at the Blackfoot Shirts Conference, Pitt Rivers Museum, 2012

I am extremely sad to announce the sudden death of Kainai elder and teacher Narcisse Blood (Tatsikiistamik), who was a mentor to Pitt Rivers Museum staff since 2001 across the Kainai Photos Project and then the Blackfoot Shirts Project. He contributed the Foreword to Pictures Bring Us Messages, the book about the photographs project. Narcisse visited the Museum several times and came to open the PRM version of the Blackfoot shirts exhibition with his wife Alvine Mountain Horse and family. A filmmaker whose work was supported by the National Film Board of Canada, Narcisse contributed a video to the PRM exhibition as well as quotes, photographs, and overall guidance. Narcisse also assisted other museums in the UK and gave guest lectures at the University of Aberdeen as well as at Oxford.


Narcisse was a true scholar and the humblest man I ever met. He was exceptionally generous in supporting the Museum’s work in so many ways. Narcisse had a very gentle voice but also a tough, unwavering commitment to Blackfoot people, to the environment, and to improving cross-cultural relationships and understanding. These commitments led him to work on the Glenbow Museum’s collaboratively-produced Blackfoot gallery, to serve on the Mookaakin Cultural and Heritage Foundation and to teach at Red Crow Tribal College, to encourage those who participated in traditional Blackfoot ceremonial ways and to support outsiders as we began to learn about Blackfoot culture.


When interviewed about the Blackfoot Shirts Project, and the hard reality for Blackfoot people that many Blackfoot heritage items are held in museums in the UK, Narcisse said,


My question is “Preservation for who?” If the preservation of these shirts would serve the purpose of bridging the gap that exists in how we understand each other, then it is worthwhile to preserve them. But they haven’t done that.

As museums, if you are teaching, then why is there still such misunder-standing? Why is there still so much ignorance [in] Blackfoot territory?


So it begs that question: “Who are you preserving them for?”

Thank you, Narcisse, for giving so many of us so much to think about. Thank you for teaching us, for your friendship and support and enthusiasm and vision.






Condolences to Alvine Mountain Horse, Narcisse’s wife, and to their family.

Magic

photograph by Laura Peers

The view from my 'desk' in the Pitt Rivers Museum seminar room/carving studio this week: the magical combination of historic box, new box in progress of being carved, very sharp carving tools, extraordinary Haida artists Gwaai and Jaalen Edenshaw, oh, and a water-cooled Tormek sharpening thingy by the sink. Which now has a plexi screen between it and the historic box, just to keep museological standards up.

I say 'magical' because there are powerful taboos about bringing all of these elements together, even now when museums have gone a long distance toward making collections available to communities to learn from and reconnect with. The process of carving the new box with the historic box in the room brings together museum protocols and values (always having staff in the room with objects, having an alarm on the room at night, not exposing historic collections to damage from sharp tools or water, preserving objects forever) with indigenous community protocols and values, and with artists' needs to  touch the box to measure the dept of carving, to use gauges to record profiles of carved elements, to get samples of new paint as close as possible to the historic paint to match colours. We are all in this together; it's just that there is a powerful kind of energy in the room where all of this, and all of us, do come together.