Rethinking the ARtifAct
One of the most significant events of the recent bicentennial commemorations for Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the American West was an important exhibition of the few remaining Native American artifacts directly associated with the famous voyage put on by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. When I first viewed the exhibit, From Nation to Nation: Examining Lewis and Clark’s Indian Collection, in the spring of 2004, I was struck by the changes that have occurred in recent years in museology and the culture of display surrounding ethnographic objects and Native American arts. This change was especially striking at a museum such as the Peabody. To me, and many other Native people, such institutions are notorious symbols of the dark legacy of the early days of anthropology and ethnography in the Americas. We think of objects (not to mention human remains) unearthed, stolen, bought, and sometimes swindled away from indigenous peoples living in the aftermath of conquest and removal, and we wince to see them placed on display far removed from their sacred or cultural contexts. Yet at the Peabody an attempt was made to reexamine meaningfully these artifacts that played some part in the initial cultural and diplomatic exchanges between Euro-Americans and Native peoples of the Plains and the West.
The greatest challenge for an exhibit such as the Peabody’s is to attempt to tell a different story than the one the majority culture has been telling for the last two hundred years. That challenge is exacerbated by the fact that in museums this is a story to be told largely through the display of artifacts. As a museumgoer, I have often been confronted with alienated and alienating artifacts displayed violently out of context. This is the case with museums throughout the United States. What is one to make of the seemingly random collection of North American Indian artifacts in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, placed as it is in a section dedicated to the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas? Here beautiful objects from several centuries, four continents, and a vast variety of cultures are collapsed into a single component of this predominantly Euro-American collection. Because the Metropolitan’s collection is encyclopedic it includes other non-Western traditions, but they too run the unintended risk of marginalization in an institution predicated on the culturally inscribed notions of art history and connoisseurship that governed such collecting well into the twentieth century. Sincere attempts have been made to inform the viewer of these non-Western objects of their original significance, but the authority over their interpretation remains firmly in the hands of their curators.
