Native American Voices on Identity, Art, and Culture: Objects of Everlasting Esteem (review)

As discussed at recent national and international conferences and publications, museums are slowly moving toward giving the right to contextualize objects in collections back to their original constituencies. This book reflects a very good effort to do just that and provides other museums a model to follow on collaborating with Native people to link museum collections to the needs of present-day Native people, as well as to provide information for the future.

What mainstream museum curators need to understand and accept is that for many Native people today, museum objects embody the painful legacy of colonialism. Many of these items were donated to museums by way of military campaigns, forced relocations, thefts from Native burial sites, or sanctioned academic excavations. In some cases, as at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Native staff members collected objects for the museum and wondered whether they were doing the right thing. Native people have ambivalent feelings about objects taken by these means from their relatives and housed in mainstream museums, separate from the cultures that created them and the context of how they were used and what they mean. They are happy that the objects have been preserved, but wonder how they can have relevance and help tribal nations today when they are housed far from home and away from their cultural context.

The colonial ethnography/anthropology museum is a thing of the past. Museums around the world are moving toward a more inclusive collaborative relationship with the cultures represented in collections. Or Native people themselves are creating their own museums/cultural centers to interpret stories their own way. As W. Richard West Jr., director of the National Museum of the American Indian, described this new approach, "(NMAI) aspires to go beyond the artful presentation of objects, to represent and interpret the ideas, peoples, and communities that surround those collections . . . From a Native standpoint, the object itself may be less important than the processes leading to its creation. It is those aspects of experience—traditions, songs, spiritual beliefs, and ritual and ceremonial practices—that speak to the wholeness of living Native cultures" (Paper "The National Museum of the American Indian: Journeys in the Post-Colonial World" presented for conference "Connections, Communities, and Collections," in Miami Beach, Fla., July 10–12, 2006).

The editors of Objects of Everlasting Esteem believed that objects can be healing when Native people write about them and what they mean for the future of Native culture. The book is written for a general audience, and it is important that the public, as well as Native people, understand how museum collections developed over time and why they are housed in a museum. The book documents three broad periods of collecting and exhibiting throughout the Penn Museum's history: evolutionism (1887–1912), historical particularism (1912–1994), and collaboration (1995–present). The introduction highlights the museum's major shift "to work closely with Native peoples to address the complex issues of representation and interpretation" (9), describing a permanent exhibition that Dorothy Washburn curated in 1995 and called "Living in Balance: The Universe of the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, and Apache."

By contacting Native people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences to talk about museum objects, this book emulates Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection, edited by Simon J. Ortiz. The editor solicited input from fourteen Native educators, poets, artists, activists, and writers to write about the relevance of historical photographs made by Frank Rinehart and Adolph Muhr at the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska. In a similar way, the editors of Objects of Everlasting Esteem invited collaborators to visit the museum's collections of forty thousand objects, choose an object, and submit poems, essays, personal narratives, or stories. The editors welcomed any contributions along a broad range of topics, including sovereignty, cosmology, oral history, language, family, education...