Displaying Native American Culture

Displaying Native American Culture

New York Times
December 21, 2004
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Who Should Tell History: The Tribes or the Museums?
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

CHICAGO - Museums always make use of the past for the sake of the present. They collect it, shape it, insist on its significance. When that past is also prehistoric, when its objects come to the present without written history and with jumbled oral traditions, a museum can even become the past's primary voice.

But what if that prehistoric past is also claimed by some as a living heritage? Then disagreements about interpretation develop into battles over the museum's very function.

That was the result, for example, at the Smithsonian Institution's $219 million National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in September in Washington and calls itself a "museum different." George Gustav Heye's extraordinary collection of 800,000 tribal American objects is put in service of contemporary Indian cultures with tribal guest curators determining how their heritage is to be presented. The result is homogenized pap in which the collection is used not to reveal the past's complexities, but to serve the present's simplicities.

There are, however, other ways in which the prehistoric past can be revealed, as two exhibitions in Chicago suggest. At the Field Museum, "Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas," is remarkable not just for its careful exploration of the famed archeological site high in the Peruvian Andes, but also for demonstrating an almost devotional care to exhuming a lost past. At the Art Institute of Chicago, "Hero, Hawk and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South" is no less remarkable in its display of objects created by ancient American cultures, but it is subject to many of the same forces that molded the National Museum of the American Indian. Here though, rather than overturning the museum's enterprise, they merely distract from it.

First, the Machu Picchu exhibition. Created by the Peabody Museum at Yale, it offers the largest collection of Incan artifacts ever shown in the United States, including robust three-foot-high jugs for corn beer (which was fermented by the saliva of women who chewed the maize before brewing it); samples of bright, geometrically ornamented 500-year-old fabrics; and a corded "quipu," a linked collection of knotted strings used to record events and numerical accounts. The curators are Richard L. Burger, a Yale anthropologist, and Lucy C. Salazar, a Peruvian archaeologist.

The major question about Machu Picchu has not been who speaks for its past, but what that past actually was. The site, with its terraced, mountainous landscape and stone structures, was known to only a few local inhabitants when it was discovered by Hiram Bingham III, who led Yale's Peruvian Expedition in 1911. As Mr. Berger and Ms. Salazar explain various hypotheses by Bingham, including one that the site was a sacred nunnery for Incan "Virgins of the Sun," have been conclusively disproved. The curators established, instead, that it was a summer retreat for a ruling Incan family, built between 1450 and 1470 and used only for about 80 years before being abandoned in the face of the Incas' defeat by Pizarro's Spanish armies.

The exhibition also makes it clear what an extraordinary site Machu Picchu is. Nestled in the cloud-decked mountains of the Andes, its architecture serves as a kind of cosmic clock, the sun and constellations appearing in certain stone windows at specific times of the year. The exhibition shows how scientists have used bone fragments to analyze the Incan diet (60 percent maize), and demonstrates how Incan skulls were deliberately elongated by molds placed on infants' heads, presumably for aesthetic effect. One emerges astonished by this lost world.

Still, there are subtle traces of contemporary claims evident in the portrayal of this prehistoric culture. After all, Machu Picchu is now a national symbol in Peru; in 2001, it was used for the inauguration of the president, Alejandro Toledo. It is also the object of almost mystical devotion. Hundreds of thousands of tourists climb its ruins every year.

In response, perhaps, there are hints of overly tactful delicacy in the exhibition's descriptions of Incan society. Incan aesthetic and cosmological preoccupations become clear, but other aspects do not, including a rigid social structure that involved forms of slavery, a religious culture that incorporated human sacrifice, and a military organization powerful enough to conquer 2,500 miles of the South American coastline and build 25,000 miles of roads. Mr. Berger, in an e-mail message, said that for the Peruvians, the Incans looked good compared to the Spaniards. The exhibition wants us to admire, and we do. But we know less about what we might admire less.

At the Art Institute of Chicago more explicit pressures are at work, and they nearly derail the considerable achievements of "Hero, Hawk and Open Hand." The exhibition is devoted to products of societies that thrived along the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers as early as 5,000 B.C. Their remnants can still be seen in landscapes near Newark, Ohio, or St. Clair County, Ill., in enormous earthen mounds and geometric shapes outlined by raised ground.

These structures testify to a highly organized society barely glimpsed by European settlers. Some sites had already been abandoned by the time the Europeans arrived. Others were devastated by diseases brought by the settlers, which wiped out as much as 90 percent of their Indian populations.

But as Richard F. Townsend, the curator of the department of African and Amerindian art at the Art Institute, shows, these cultures' mastery can be sensed in the objects produced: a haunting 2,000-year-old elongated face smoothed out of stone found in Kentucky; a graceful, elegant hand cut out of mica from about the same era in Ohio; a 500-year-old wooden figure - half human, half feline - found in Florida.

Such a display, along with historical commentary, would once have been sufficient. But contemporary Indian tribes, supported by some scholars, have argued that they have an ancestral connection to these cultures. And since museums have not traditionally displayed much sensitivity toward living cultures, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act now obliges them to consult with tribes about their holdings. In preparation for the exhibition, four years were spent consulting with tribal leaders. But to what end?

Joyce Bear, the cultural preservation officer of the Muscogee Nation, has the exhibition's first word, declaring on the wall leading to the galleries, that it will "make our tribal people realize that we are descendants of a wonderful and great culture." In the catalog, she proudly announces that the exhibition proves that "I come from kings and queens." The exhibition ends with a statement about a "new, sweeping movement of cultural preservation" among Indians, including a film showing their renewal of traditions.

But all this has little to do with the objects on display and makes it seem as if the exhibition's purpose were to boost tribal pride. Also, while there may indeed be ancient traditions that have found their way into contemporary practices, the nature of these connections, at the very least, demands closer scrutiny.

One anthropologist's assertion that contemporary Indian beliefs are "analogous" to those of these ancient cultures is challenged by others in the catalog. Mr. Townsend writes that these earthworks were "built by peoples whose achievements and ancestral connections to present day tribes are at best only vaguely surmised." Robert L. Hall, an anthropologist, points out that Cahokia, an imposing culture on the Mississippi that was already in decline in the 14th century, "left no written records and no native peoples possess oral traditions that specifically identify Cahokia or even recognize its existence." In the 18th century, another writer says, Indians encountered by settlers "did not construct mounds, nor did any of them have oral traditions relating to these earthworks."

Even the exhibition's explanations of these societies' workings seem idealized, skewed by contemporary sensitivities. In the catalog, for example, an anthropologist, David H. Dye, explores warfare among the Mississippi Indians, but it is barely alluded to in the exhibition, despite the presence of objects like a pipe (1200-1500 A.D.) sculpted as a bound captive and a vase whose decorations are "trophy scalps stretched in a starlike pattern." The exhibition gives so refined a picture of these societies that there is no way of knowing how important such images were, or where historical evidence of slavery and human sacrifice fits in.

This is also, of course, what happened in the Smithsonian's Indian museum. Since almost no tribes had a written culture and oral traditions were disrupted by disease, massacre, government policy and assimilation, the tribal curators often seem to know less about their history than do scholars. Yet scholars' assessments are ignored in favor of self-promotional platitudes.

All this is a form of guilty overcompensation for past museum sins that themselves need re-examination and assessment. In the meantime, exhibitions like the one on Machu Picchu serve as reminders of what is possible. And the objects at the Art Institute can still be heard straining to speak for themselves, despite the layers of promotional and political gauze in which they are wrapped.