Curators and Ceremonies

Detail, Blackfoot shirt 1893.67.3, Pitt Rivers Museum

In the summer of 2012, I attended a traditional Blackfoot ceremony in Alberta, Canada. These days, with museums developing relationships with Indigenous communities, curators are sometimes invited to ceremonies as part of the process of relationship-building and to educate us about their cultures. I have had the privilege of working with Blackfoot people and attending ceremonies with them since 2001.

There are protocols for attending Blackfoot ceremonies. Women wear moccasins and long skirts and shawls, and I have a special set of clothing that I keep for these occasions. It is not permitted to photograph or take notes during ceremonies: you are expected to learn by observing and thinking about what you see, and taking it into your heart. Since traditional knowledge is passed on experientially and by various forms of initiation, it is also not appropriate to describe ceremonies online, especially for an outsider such as myself. Sometimes, though, there are things that I notice during ceremonies that have more to do with the bigger picture of what is happening, rather than what is going on in the ceremony, and these observations can be a way of learning. They can, especially, be a way of learning why it is that a museum curator like myself comes to be sitting in a ceremony, feeling clumsy and bewildered, hoping desperately not to make embarrassing mistakes. There’s a reason you’re here.

June 2012, somewhere in Blackfoot Territory, Alberta, Canada: Two enormous tipis have been pinned together to hold everyone for the ceremony, and they are now billowing and creaking in a prairie windstorm. It is a bit like being on a sailboat in a high wind. There is a fire in the other tipi near the elders and those who are running the ceremony; I can smell the smudge and hear the fire crackling, but am tucked in a corner and can’t see them. The grass sticks to my moccasins, the food is incredibly generous, and whoever put the berries in the frybread is a genius.

There is such a good feeling here, it’s relatives and friends gathering to be blessed and to support those holding the ceremony, and those of us ‘from away’ are welcomed warmly by friends. At one point there’s a pause in the proceedings while people are invited to have their faces painted, which is a way of blessing people, asking for protection and assistance. We all line up and as I am waiting my turn, I notice two little girls in front of me who look like they are about 4 and 7 years old. They go up to the ceremonial people who are painting us, completely confident. They tell their Blackfoot names to the woman who is praying for them, they know the prayer, they turn around at the right time, give the blessings back to the woman who is praying for them, and go skipping off together after it’s done, braids bouncing behind them.

These beautiful, confident girls have no idea of the weight of history and politics behind this. It’s normal to them. Where we are, what we are doing, what they have just done, is precisely what missionaries and government tried to destroy. I am humbled and very moved: what incredibly strong people, to have survived everything they have been through and to raise such children. It’s a reminder about why we are learning to work together across cultures. Every time I wonder why I am doing this work, I will remember those little girls.

Dancing in (and outside) the Museum

Haida dancers on lawn outside Pitt Rivers Museum and Oxford University
Museum of Natural History, September 2009. Photograph by Drew Davey.

In September 2009, the Pitt Rivers Museum was delighted to host a visit by nearly two dozen members of the Haida Nation, whose homeland is Haida Gwaii, a group of islands between Vancouver Island and Alaska. The Museum’s collections include a magnificent totem pole and some 300 other objects from Haida Gwaii. We wanted to learn more about these objects and to provide access to them for Haida people, and we hoped to create a permanent relationship with the Haida Nation around the collections to address these needs.

The visit was overwhelming. Few research visits of that scale have ever occurred, and retrieving, photographing, conserving, and updating records for 300 objects was a huge task. It was a great success, despite its challenges, and one of my abiding memories of the visit is of Haida song and dance, and of Haida drums echoing through the museum and across the front lawn. Music and dance have been an important focus for reclaiming cultural practices on Haida Gwaii after the decades of assimilation policies. Haida delegates wanted very much to share their culture through dance performances, and we created several opportunities: a potluck supper for the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and public events held on the lawn outside the Natural History Museum. Dance also occurred in the research rooms with some of the objects that we were all looking at: a salmon dance wand, with moveable jaws, was danced gently with its appropriate songs. I will remember the ‘clack, clack’ that the jaws of the salmon wand made for the rest of my life.

Museum staff usually see objects lying motionless. To see dance wands, button blankets, headdresses and masks in action adds a special dimension to our understanding of the objects we care for, and reminds us that they belong to living traditions. For members of the public in Oxford to whom the totem pole is a much-loved part of the Museum, seeing and listening to Haida people was the first opportunity that most had ever had to experience some of the cultural context for the pole. It was also a reminder that the pole belongs to the Museum in some ways, but continues to belong to Haida people in other ways.

Part of maintaining a permanent relationship involves simply keeping in touch, and several of us at the Museum are Facebook friends with Haida people whom we met during that visit in 2009. Over the past few months, there have been two major earthquakes on Haida Gwaii, of 7.7 and 7.2 magnitude, with numerous serious aftershocks. As I read the anxious postings of Haida friends, and then the reassurances they sent each other that all was well, I was reminded both of how fragile human societies are, and of how strong.

Haida friends, we are thinking of you, all the way over here in Oxford.

A video made about the Haida visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum, ‘Everything was Carved,’ is available on our website and is also available on Vimeo.

You can see photographs of the Haida collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

You can also search on the Museum’s database for ‘Haida’.

Samuel Black's Bag (PRM 1893.67.183)

PRM 1893.67.183

Some objects pull you back to them every time you see them, no matter how many years you’ve looked at them. For me, this is one such object. It’s an embroidered and beaded cloth bag made for Samuel Black, from Aberdeen in Scotland, who became a fur trader in western Canada. He had two successive wives—probably the daughters of senior fur traders and their Aboriginal wives—and a number of children. Although his marriages  were not legitimated in church, he abided by the fur trade custom of marriage ‘according to the custom of the country,’ which involved treating an Aboriginal or Metis woman as a legitimate wife. His will was contested by his Scottish family, who saw his children as illegitimate.

Black was not an easy man. George Simpson, the head of the Hudson’s Bay Company, described him as 'the strangest man I ever knew...A perfectly honest man and his generosity might be considered indicative of a warmth of heart if he was not known to be a cold blooded fellow who could be guilty of any Cruelty and would be a perfect Tyrant if he had power...Has not the talent of conciliating Indians by whom he is disliked'. In fact, he was murdered by an Aboriginal man in early 1841. Nevertheless, some woman loved him enough to make him this extraordinary bag. It has his name on one side—extraordinary in itself, because at least one of Black’s daughters signed various documents with the x that indicates illiteracy, and it seems likely that none of his 'country' family was literate. Even more extraordinary is the design worked on the reverse of the bag, on the side worn next to the body: a heart motif. This is not the usual urn and spray of flowers motif one usually sees on such items; hearts are uncommon. Made probably by one of Black’s daughters of mixed ancestry, I think it means what most of us would think it means: it’s a symbol of love.

Detail, reverse, PRM 1893.67.183

And so, in exquisitely tiny stitches, the colours faded but still gorgeous, this woman’s embroidery still speaks: of love, of the bridges between cultures, of a life that moved from Scotland to fur posts and Aboriginal camps. When we say of museum objects, ‘it’s Cree’ or ‘it’s Chinese’ or ‘it’s Scottish,’ we don’t often think of such complex cultural paths. Our lives often have them, though, and it’s a reminder that people have always loved across cultural boundaries.

I’ve written more about the bag in various places:

2009 ‘Material Culture, Identity, and Colonial Society in the Canadian Fur Trade’. In Maureen Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., Women and Things, 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies. Ashgate.

1999.  “ ‘Many Tender Ties’: The Shifting Contexts and Meanings of the S BLACK Bag.” World Archaeology, 31(2), fall 1999, 288-302.

Why the Pitt Rivers Museum is not a Hobbit Museum

Why the Pitt Rivers Museum is not a Hobbit Museum

I'm sure you know, of course, that hobbits have museums. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien says that hobbits have 'mathom-houses', for mathoms: things that are no longer used, but which one doesn’t wish to throw away. They are things filled with the vestiges of lives past and gone, and they accumulate, like fossils: mathoms are dead things.

The displays of the Pitt Rivers Museum look a bit like I imagine a mathom-house would look. It’s dark in there, and there are all sorts of old things. They aren’t actually used much, either: most of them are things from when people did things a different way, or with materials that aren’t used very much any more. The stocks from the village I live in are there, along with bows and arrows, quite a lot of archaic weapons, Samurai armor, shell armbands, string made of out bison hair, and capes made for the royal family of Hawaii which are completely covered in the bright feathers of now-extinct birds. None of this stuff is used any more in the sense it was originally intended to be used. The place is a mathom-house (though, alas, it does not contain the sword Sting).

And yet: jewelry designers come to look at jeweler from around the world. Basket makers can see, in one case, how basket makers around the world have solved the problem of going around corners and finishing rims, in many different media. Authors set stories here, both they and their characters taking inspiration from the maze of cases and their contents. Students come to draw: there’s no end to the things you can draw in this place.

And people come from the communities that the objects came from, to work with them. They come to learn. The ancestors may be gone from us, says one Blackfoot artist, but what they knew is embodied in the things they made, and if we study those things carefully, the ancestors will teach us through the objects. And not just how to make bison-hair string or use it to tie things together, or what they used to get that paint colour. The objects, their materials, their technical processes of making, are tied to people: the community and the social relations in which they were made, and the broader community of other-than-human persons in which they were made. The spirits of bison are in that string, along with an understanding of the proper way to show respect to bison relatives and maintain good relations with them. Making paints, in most North American indigenous societies, requires prayer. Paint is often sacred, used for protection against spiritual harm. You wear paint in ceremony where sacred powers are very strong. Ancestors wore it into battle for protection and success. These things are not ‘dead’—they work very powerfully in the present.

And so the collections are used to inspire creativity and learning in the present. They also provoke memory and cultural knowledge, and help to restore cultural practices, and thus to strengthen Indigenous identity in the present. This is not looking to the past to stay in the past; it is about knowing who you are today. This is not a mathom-house: these things are still very much in use.

 

First words

I am the curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum for the Americas collections, from one pole to the other. I work with Native American and First Nations peoples and objects and histories. The Americas collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum include amazing historical material--a wampum belt that might come from Pocahantas' father, Powhatan; the earliest canoe model from the east coast; Inupiat items from the first British journey through the Northwest Passage. Caring for them--curating--involves a lot of sensitive issues: how to create access to heritage items for overseas communities; repatriation; the politics of cross-cultural research; addressing the legacy of collections acquired under varying forms of colonial duress. It has involved creating bridges between the Museum’s extraordinary historic collections and the communities they come from. We are trying to provide access to material heritage for communities who need to work with it to strengthen their cultural identity in the present. We're also trying to learn more about the collections so that we can take better care of them and inform visitors.

Sometimes Indigenous delegations come to the Museum to work with collections; sometimes we bring objects closer to their communities as loans. Sometimes I go to Haida and Blackfoot and Ojibwe and Haudenosaunee communities in North America to ask for help and to show people what is in the collection. Sometimes we provide access to collections digitally, either as photographs on Flickr or as a live video link. We are always looking for new ways to provide access. We’re looking for ways to bring the knowledge they want to share about the collections to our other audiences in the Museum as well.

Occasionally, during visits by Indigenous researchers, they have invited my colleagues and I to dance with them. The objects we’ve been working with are placed gently to one side of the room and the entire research building resonates with drums, song, and dance. This is a magical place, and it’s an extraordinary job. I look forward to telling you about it in this blog. This is just my voice, not The Museum’s, nor any of my colleagues’, nor that of any of the Indigenous people I have worked with (all of whom would surely tell things very differently). It’s just me, in a state of wonderment, looking around at this extraordinary space, thinking of all the extraordinary opportunities it offers. This is an inspiring space, but one which often feels strange as well as amazing. I look forward to sharing it with you.