"Lost and Lonesome": Literary Reflections on Museums and the Roles of Relics

In Gerald Vizenor's screenplay and in the film Harold of Orange (1984) Harold, the trickster word-warrior, stands on a glass display case in the anthropology department museum (presumably at the University of Minnesota) and from his perch berates anthropologists as he likens the effect of museums to that of zoos. Harold's comparison is doubly effective (and disturbing) because it plays on images of caged animals on display and at the same time suggests that Native American visitors to the museum feel themselves displaced because of such displays: "Those anthropologists invented us, and then they put our bones in these museum cases. We come to the cities from our tribal past and pace around . . . like lost and lonesome animals." In the same scene Harold recalls the nineteenth-century ghost dance to suggest that such museum collections will simply disappear: "I was dancing how high the earth will be come the ghost dance vision . . . [w]hen all this disappears."¹

In this scene Vizenor offers comic reversals that, according to Kimberly Blaeser, "challenge readers to reconsider the readily accepted treatment of the remains of 'primitive' cultures as museum objects and the implied hierarchy that allows or endorses such practice." Vizenor repudiates

colonialism and ethnocentric assumptions which he believes underlie the practice of Indian anthropology, particularly the practice of raising to the level of ultimate explicator recorders of culture on the single basis of their being themselves from an "other," dominant and supposedly superior culture.²

Through comedy and comic reversals Vizenor also asks his readers and viewers to reconsider the pat assumptions and the ethnocentric worldviews that proscribe the bones and material culture of one ethnic group to museum-piece status while members of another ethnic group—that of Western Europeans and of Western European descent in this context—remain free, in Vizenor's language, of their tribal pasts.

Vizenor is one of several American Indian writers who reflect on the place of objects as they are displayed for cultural consumption, questioning the role of museums particularly in housing and displaying those objects. In light of such works of literature I argue that in different ways each of these writers presents a critique of museum culture and in so doing offers a form of American Indian self-representation that challenges mainstream European and European American accounts of history and identity through artifact. Although much has perhaps changed since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), according to several of these writers and other indigenous peoples, much remains the same. Tuscarora scholar Rick Hill, for example, argues that museum apologists "argue that these sacred materials are essential to maintaining the integrity of their collections and that the remains of our dead are part of the national heritage" of the United States. Even with the passage of a bill like NAGPRA, suggests Hill, a problem remains: "Despite their centrality to the museum world, American Indians are often viewed as being outside the fiduciary and moral mandate of these institutions." Furthermore, there is "embedded in this policy . . . the assumption that modern native people lacked sufficient ties to their ancient ancestors" and thus would not deserve to have returned to them the artifacts or human remains in question.³ Hill also maintains that there are problems involving cultural patrimony, which NAGPRA defines as "an object having ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance central to the Native American group or culture itself."⁴ Hill's concern here, a concern echoed by the writers investigated in this essay, is that "the validity of Indian beliefs is often questioned, bringing the resistance to repatriation to a new level of paternalism. Indian concepts of sacredness, spirit, and religion differ from those of other cultures."⁵ These differences often result in misunderstandings and confuse issues of how or whether artifacts should be displayed, stored, or repatriated. Despite his several misgivings, Hill does conclude his essay by noting that some progress has been made. He foresees improved relations between museum personnel and people in American Indian communities.

Writing in the 1980s...