Fascinating Challenges: Studying Material Culture with Dorothy Burnham by Judy Thompson, Judy Hall, Leslie Tepper (review)

humanities 365 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 benefit fully from Belton=s much more embracing sense of visual culture, many will have to unlearn, or at least suspend, what they have been told is the truth about art history. To replace the inevitable resistance with a freer and more revealing sense of the meanings of the visual, the ideal, I think, would be to read Sights of Resistance first, as one=s introduction to the study of visual culture. (MARK A. CHEETHAM) Judy Thompson, Judy Hall, and Leslie Tepper, in collaboration with Dorothy Burnham. Fascinating Challenges: Studying Material Culture with Dorothy Burnham Canadian Museum of Civilization. xvi, 268. $29.95 As the subtitle suggests, Fascinating Challenges: Studying Material Culture with Dorothy Burnham is a tribute to the life and work of the well-renowned museum scholar Dorothy Burnham. This volume, however, is much more than a retrospective view of her work and the work that she inspired. It also outlines and exemplifies a method for analysing material culture, while at the same time telling many interwoven stories of the relationships between and among museum artifacts and different groups of peoples. The book begins with several introductory chapters that provide the context for the projects that are detailed in the four major sections of the book. These sections, entitled >Athabaskan Studies,= >Arctic Studies,= >Plateau Studies,= and >Eastern Woodlands Studies,= include entries by Thompson, Hall, and Tepper, who are all curators at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC), and Burnham herself, as well as Fraser, Kritsch, and Hewitt, who are representatives or members of Native communities whose work benefited from Burnham=s particular skills. Finally, in a brief epilogue, members of the CMC staff contribute their impressions of Burnham. Who is Dorothy Burnham? As a former curator of the Textile Department at the Royal Ontario Museum, she designed and published several important exhibitions on early Canadian weaving. During her retirement, she completed a study of painted hide coats whose novel method of analysis attracted critical acclaim (To Please the Caribou, 1992). Besides her effervescent personality, her particular virtue is that she is a proficient weaver, pattern-maker, and draughtswoman. These skills enable her to produce detailed drawings of quill and weaving techniques, as well as garment pattern pieces. In her own modest words, >I look long and carefully and then simply record what I see with a scale drawing and sometimes a few added words.= More than mere observation, however, Burnham=s scrutiny opens doors of inquiry that other approaches do not. The stories told in this volume fall into concentric rings around Burnham=s contribution to the CMC=s exhibition Threads of the Land: Clothing Traditions from Three Indigenous Cultures (1995). In the first short chapter, Judy Thompson, Judy Hall, and Leslie Tepper tell the stories of their 366 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 collaboration with Burnham on these projects. Next, Burnham gives a brief autobiography and chronology of her work. Her story reveals a largely forgotten world of museum practice in which a lowly >second assistant draftsman= rose through the ranks to become a leader in museum scholarship. The articles in the major sections are layered with stories of the history of collecting and the history of Native peoples, as well as stories of collaborations between museum curators and members of Native communities. They also tell stories revealed by the materials, techniques, and styles of the garments themselves. These range from fragments of narratives that string together highly technical descriptions to Karen Wright Fraser=s engaging narrative of the spiritual journey she undertook to recreate a nineteenth-century Gwich=in caribou hide tunic. The volume=s research topics include distribution patterns, the cultural attributions of particular artifacts, the revival of >lost= techniques, and the relationship between function, design and meaning. Fascinating Challenges is an important contribution to museum scholarship for several reasons. First, Burnham=s diagrams and the analyses of Thompson, Hall, and Tepper serve as vivid testimony to the >engineering feats= of pre-contact Native garment design. Second, the volume=s contributions to the history of collecting are a welcome addition to a...