American Indian Culture and Research Journal

White Americans are inclined to forget how deeply imprinted is the influence of the Indian on our life and culture. Indian names and traditions have been absorbed into our language and folklore. It is interesting to be reminded that the dress and the materials they used also have provided ideas that are still being turned to account in giving distinction to American fashion trends. —Rochester Democrat Chronicle The exhibition has been a really brilliant success. About 2,000 students from public and private schools have been taken through the show by our staff or their teachers. Costume design students from the Maryland Institute have made sketches of the show. Adults as well as children have been enthusiastic. The receptionist tells me that more persons have asked for booklets or postcards of your exhibition than have made inquiries about any other exhibit held here. She estimates that a total of 25,000 people have seen the Indian show. It is high spot of the year. —Belle Boas For approximately twenty-five years I have been researching how museologists, especially anthropologists, have affected Southwest Native American art through their perceptions of, and interpretive paradigms about, Native peoples. Some theoretical issues I have been interested in are: (1) how and why museologists attempted to relabel and reevaluate ethnographic specimens as ethnic and fine art, (2) how they developed markets for and encouraged commodification of art, (3) how they created or tried to manipulate class-specific concepts of taste through displays, lectures, and outreach programs, and (4) the message museologists wanted to convey about quality to the Euro-American public as part of the continuous debates over crafts and material culture versus fine art, prestige, and status. American Indian studies scholars must address the theoretical and behavioral intersections of race, class, gender, and culture in the context of a multicultural United States and do so in ways that conceptualize America as a complex and dynamic culture that has experienced many fads and longer-term polar-value changes over time. We must also document how anthropologists and museologists have tried to fight stereotypes through manipulating and revaluing visual representations, and do so within the parameters of how cultural definitions have fluctuated through time and by place (to prevent presentism). Scholars must also attempt to understand how Native feelings and philosophies about these activities and collection and exhibition techniques have changed since the 1870s, again controlling for time and place and culture. When researching this complex and multifaceted topic, I have been theoretically concerned with both institutional and individual initiatives and the importance of setting, place, and social landscape over time

INTRODUCTION Each August, tens of thousands of people make their annual pilgrimage to Santa Fe’s Indian Market (fig. 1), a two-day event held on the city’s historic downtown plaza and surrounding streets. The eighty-six-year-old market attracts buyers and artists for unarguably the most important Indian art event of the calendar year. Artists spend months preparing, often producing or saving their best pieces to enter in the judging and to sell. Buyers plan their year around the market, making hotel reservations a year or more in advance, while others have second homes that are used sparingly except during the Santa Fe summer. The market transforms New Mexico’s state capitol. The plaza area is closed to all traffic, and the streets are lined with 635 artist booths, food stands, information tables, tee shirt and book sales tents, and portable outhouses. The Native art world—artists, curators, and collectors—also descends on Santa Fe not as entrants but to be there for the multitude of meetings, conferences, and gallery and museum openings. Just outside the traffic barriers and banners that denote the official space of the Indian Market are hundreds of vendors selling their own Indian art in organized shows or simply by placing their wares on a blanket or low wall. Other vendors sell every type of ethnic clothing and bauble as part of Santa Fe and Native chic. In recent years, a new participant has entered the Indian Market: the booth sitter. These booth sitters are the art buyers who form the lines at some booths twenty-four or more hours before the artist arrives on Saturday morning to ensure that they will be first in line or among the first to buy an artist’s work.

This article explores ways of creating public art, ways of looking, and ways of remembering. It focuses on how one work in Albuquerque, New Mexico, twines around these three notions and produces new ways of thinking about each. My perspective is that the best public art shapes the ways in which people examine themselves, their lives, and their worlds. It opens up critical, rational spaces that ask viewers to critique themselves and their thinking. It is also capable of social and personal intervention, inspiration, and transformation. For these reasons, I focus on one component within a larger work of public art. The piece actively presents an opportunity to rethink the world around it. By extension, it also presents the opportunity to rethink one’s self. It offers little prescription for looking and instead encourages the imaginative by engaging the senses. I offer here neither a detailed chronology nor a complete art historical record. Rather, I examine the speculative and theoretical contours and possibilities within the piece. I engage with establishing memory as a kind of artistic language that may activate crucial new understandings of potentially painful narratives. The work of art under consideration here is Numbe Whageh by Nora Naranjo-Morse (Tewa of Santa Clara Pueblo). It is the first monumental piece of public art by a female Native artist and is part of the city of Albuquerque’s Cuartocentenario Memorial, installed at the Albuquerque Museum in 2005. However, the memorial had generated controversy for years before its installation, with the planning process reflecting the polarized standoff over history and space implicit today in issues of representation and public memorials. The Cuartocentenario Memorial marks the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Spanish conquistador don Juan de Oñate in what is now New Mexico. The memorial comprises two linked segments, La Jornada (The Journey) and Numbe Whageh (Our Center Place). La Jornada focuses on Oñate and on the settlers and livestock accompanying him; it is a group of figures rendered in bronze created by Reynaldo “Sonny” Rivera, a Hispanic artist, and Betty Sabo, a Euro-American artist. Numbe Whageh is a landscape treatment designed to represent the American Indian perspective on Oñate’s arrival.

In 1806, Emperor Franz I of Austria (1768–1835) commissioned the naturalist Baron Leopold von Fichtel (1770–1810) to acquire natural and ethnological material collected during Captain James Cook’s (1728–79) voyages at the end of the eighteenth century at an auction in London. This acquisition led to the creation of an Imperial Ethnographic Collection as a subdivision of the United Imperial and Royal Natural History Cabinets in Vienna. These were not, however, the oldest ethnographic pieces collected in Austria; several older Kunst- or Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, already housed those artifacts. At his castle in Ambras, Archduke Ferdinand II, Count of Tyrol, assembled the most well-known Wunderkammer; he was a noble lord surrounded by the phenomena of the universe, in the midst of his collectables, which were classified according to the principles of Pliny’s Natural History. At that time an exotic or strange appearance was a primary motive for collecting. Apart from a few short-termed special exhibitions, a global overview of this “otherness” of non-European cultures eventually became visible to the public eye in the ethnological exhibition halls of the Imperial and Royal Natural History Court Museum in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. The halls destined to house these objects were decorated with “ethnological” paintings and sculptures that showed representatives of different Native peoples. The manner in which these individuals are represented mediates the subjective views about non-European peoples that existed in Western societies. The sculptures of Native Americans, the scope of this study, gave the objects exhibited in the showcases a European-invented ethnological context.

In writing this article, I am responding to issues made apparent by my own research on the representation of Native American culture in public spaces, specifically, on the exhibition of objects in museums and culture centers. What began as an interest in gaining a better understanding of how American Indian objects are identified in the written materials that often inform museum didactic labeling and text panels, resulted in my realization that such terminology was applied inaccurately and inconsistently. This misapplication contributes to a prevailing ignorance of the complexities of Native cultures and lifeways. The myriad meanings associated with terms attached to current descriptors have confounded the task of writing about American Indian material culture and/or representing it in public space. My research—based on data gathered from scholarly and professional texts in the areas of fine arts, culture studies, art history, museum studies, public history, folklore, artists’ biographies, anthropology, archaeology, and American Indian studies—and my work as a trained artist, museum consultant, and scholar indicates a need to clarify the terminology and, perhaps, to standardize it. Writing and teaching about the representation of culture leads to some perplexing questions. Once in a museum-studies course a student asked me, “What is a traditional Native object?” The question was prompted by the use of the word on an exhibit label. This seemingly simple question led me to an exploration of the profound philosophies and pragmatic ramifications underlying the use of certain terminology. The answer became more of a philosophical quagmire than an actual response. As I conducted my own inquiry, the same questions continually arose about words such as authentic, genuine, and Indian-made. What did all of this terminology really mean? Was it dependent on context? Did it vary by academic discipline? Did the makers of the objects use different terms than those used by museum professionals to describe their creations?

A CULTURAL FRAME FOR TRADITIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN ART At the 2005 Native American Art Studies Association meetings in Scottsdale, Arizona (a prestigious Indian art market locale), the renowned contemporary artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an enrolled member of the Flathead Salish Nation, gave an impassioned appeal for critical writing on “fine, high, new media or cutting edge art” produced by Native Americans. Commenting that this work is often derided as “bastardized,” she exhorted her audience of Native artists and scholars, together with academics, museum curators, and art dealers from around the world, to write about the work in a mainstream art journal, not an anthropology journal or Native Peoples magazine. She implored us to differentiate contemporary from traditional American Indian art. With her provocative plea for writing that addressed what she termed the proper placement of this work within the contemporary art world, Quick-to-See Smith hit the issue of artwriting squarely on its head. Coined by the art critic, art historian, and philosopher David Carrier, artwriting is a term that describes the representational work of getting art seen, talked about, evaluated, collected, and, ultimately, institutionally ensconced in museum collections and art-historical canons. As Carrier maintains, this discursive practice is rhetorical and “seeks to persuade the viewers that the works described are aesthetically significant. . . . [T]he value of contemporary art . . . remains to be established.” By providing visual instruction, artwriting directs the reader to see objects in specific ways as works of art. A means of educating collectors in evaluative criteria and distinctions in the quality of work, it steers them to particular features of objects and often specific artists and art. As an important way of offering instruction in how to see the artistic significance of objects, a chief component of artwriting is to construct genealogies or lineages of artistic “genius.” This mode of artwriting connects contemporary practitioners to past artists with established reputations, tracing the descent of talent in the assessment of “master” status from one generation to the next. I apply Carrier’s critical insights, and those of artist and critic Victor Burgin, to a field in which they have not been utilized: traditional Native American art.

Within its short history as an institution and as a site of multilayered display and examination, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) has presented critical opportunities for the consideration of Native American art and material culture. Because NMAI is located at an important intersection between its audience of Native and non-Native individuals; its responsibility to Native communities and Native history; and its place within the Smithsonian Institution, it must strive toward complex, multifaceted goals and acknowledge Native and non-Native interests. To demonstrate these complexities, I examine one of NMAI’s recent exhibit projects, Listening to Our Ancestors: The Art of Native Life along the North Pacific Coast, in an effort to tease out the aesthetic and cultural composition of Native objects as perceived and promoted by Native and non-Native museum staff and Native community consultants. I review the operating philosophy and mission of NMAI and follow with a discussion of the object selection and presentation involved in Listening to Our Ancestors, an exhibit of which I was a museum-based cocurator and on which I have an intimate working perspective. I aim to add to our understanding of the different approaches to visualizing and displaying culture through this firsthand account of exhibit development and display at NMAI.

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.