"Red Man's Burden": The Politics of Inclusion in Museum Settings

The interactions of two distinct groups, broadly defined as Native American populations and individuals associated with the museum profession, primarily anthropologists, have fueled countless studies, manuscripts, films, and articles.¹ The contact, negotiations, and legal entanglements of these constituents and their varied interests over the past century are commonly characterized by oppositional social mores and strategies. Typically, Indigenous knowledge is perceived as subjective and restricted while Western knowledge is seen as scientific, objective, and free of restrictions. How accurate are these divisive portrayals? How do individuals and institutions work both within and outside of these parameters? On a broader level, what do these dialogues tell us about cultural encounters in an age that has been characterized not as "postcolonial" but more accurately as "late imperial"?²

This article addresses the engagements of these constituencies in a highly charged and divisive era that I will term "pre-repatriation."³ Although debates concerning the return of Native American ceremonial objects and human remains alienated from their original communities under the rationale of science or warfare have existed for a century or more, the discourses of the 1980s were characterized by a surreal, epic quality that highlights core beliefs, common narratives, and political stances. This era of ideological warfare was the period in which I received training as a museum professional of Native background. I am a member of the Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache Tribe of Oklahoma; I received my museum training at Appalachian State University, the School of Visual Arts, Institute of American Indian Arts, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia. The examples I draw from may be described as an opportunity sample of places, individuals, and circumstances that informed my perspective as a professor of museum studies at a tribal college.⁴

My intent is not to present an inclusive overview of the debates but rather to offer a personal testimony that identifies key trends and attitudes in the formation of contemporary Indigenous museum curation methods, an emerging professional field. I will argue that the rationales developed in the 1980s that advocated the inclusion of Native Americans within the museum profession as a means of bridging conceptual divides failed to achieve significant social change. While well intended, proponents of inclusion often neglected to incorporate alternative paradigms of knowledge, resulting in unrealistic assumptions about reconciling colonist legacies. Incorporation of Native bodies does not necessarily indicate incorporation of Native thought. Reductionist approaches therefore contradict the necessary interrogation of multiple knowledge systems, organizational values, and individual identities in cultural heritage debates.

I will begin with an example shared with me by my late mentor, ethnologist Edmund J. Ladd of the Pueblo of Zuni. At the time I came to know him seventeen years ago, Ed Ladd worked with the State of New Mexico's Museum of Indian Arts and Culture as their curator of ethnology. He was also responsible for overseeing the process by which eighty ahayu:da (commonly termed "War Gods" by non-Zunis) were returned to the Pueblo from thirty-eight separate repatriations over a fifteen-year period.⁵ Ladd was my link to understanding how anthropology worked for Native people—he was an Indian anthropologist who was not confused, as Vine Deloria complains, about his allegiance to the profession over the community.⁶ When I asked Ladd about his thoughts on Native control over their objects and representations in museums, he spoke eloquently about the cultural differences, really intellectual differences, involved in the repatriation debates.

We believe that things that are put in museums will eventually eat themselves up "EEWETONAWAH." In other words, they will completely disintegrate and do their own thing anyway no matter what the museum does to preserve it. We are saying to the museum "Keep them because we know better." We say to the museums "If you return [sacred objects] we will curate them according to our traditions...