-
10. Reimagining Tribal Sovereignty through Tribal History: Museums, Libraries, and Archives in the Klamath River Region
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
283 10 Reimagining Tribal Sovereignty through Tribal History Museums, Libraries, and Archives in the Klamath River Region brian isaac daniels There are a number of curious ironies in the burgeoning number of tribal museums, libraries, and archives among Indigenous communities across the United States. In the nineteenth century, nation-states employed museums and archives to preserve particular aspects of culture in order to inspire a sense of a common history for the nation. By demarcating what was official history and culture and by training citizens to treat the past and its representative objects as official and definitive, states encouraged the formation of a homogenous, ideological community that could become a governable entity. Museums, libraries, and archives were intended to instruct those who ventured within their walls. These institutions marked official history and culture; they trained people to view objects in particular ways; they taught a narrative of the past; and they offered ways with which to understand the present. As part of this effort, in the United States, museums preserved sacred Native American objects and lands in order to illustrate the “taming” of the wilderness and “triumph” of American civilization over its Indigenous peoples. This nineteenth-century narrative has been rightly challenged through the advocacy of Native American activists and their academic allies since the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. New museum exhibitions and cultural research programs are now undertaken after careful consultation and collaboration with Native people, who have insisted upon a voice in how they are represented and interpreted. Many Native American tribes have gone further to control their heritage. These communities, whose 284 daniels histories were once erased by nationalist institutions, have formed their own cultural heritage programs and created a new wave of tribal museums , libraries, and archives. There are important questions that are worth asking about this phenomenon , pointed questions about mutations of national ideology. If institutions like museums, archives, and libraries were once part of an apparatus that institutionalized sovereignty at the level of the nation-state, what happens when similar institutions appear among local tribal communities ? How might these institutions shape tribal conceptions of sovereignty ? It would be good to examine how tribal museums, libraries, and archives reshape the conceptions of sovereignty within the tribe, and thereby recast the role of preserved information, culture, and history in community life. Cultural preservation, which parses “authentic” and “sacred ” culture from its vernacular contexts, can enable novel forms of political debate, strategic organization, and rights-based legal claims. At the same time, it can transform the self-description and presentation of tribal communities and the identity of its members. In this chapter, I consider the development of tribal museums, archives , and libraries in the Klamath River region, a remote corner of northwestern California. The Klamath River seems an unlikely place to begin a discussion of the complexities of tribal sovereignty and history with the rise of casino-funded tribal museums and the high-profile placement of the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington dc. However, this secluded river canyon is the site for two significant legal cases about the cultural rights of Native Americans . Tribal communities first asserted a right to cultural preservation under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 for the Klamath River High Country. Furthermore, two tribal communities in this region have had a long-running feud about the rights they hold upon reservation lands. Here, I outline the historical circumstances of these legal battles and the consequences that they have wrought for tribal communities . In the aftermath, tribal communities worked to develop their own cultural heritage programs, citing an imminent need to document and to save the culture around them. How tribal archives, museums, and libraries have flourished in the Klamath River—and the different permutations that they have taken—speaks to the ways that documentation promises [52.15.235.28] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:18 GMT) Reimagining Tribal Sovereignty through Tribal History 285 a cultural renaissance of a different kind than the nationalist museums, archives, and libraries of another historical era. Individually, the Hupa, Yurok, and Shasta tribal communities have employed cultural documentation for their own ends.1 While these tribes live near each other in the Klamath River area, their different histories and political situations have engendered different strategic uses of their respective museums, libraries, and archives. Why these institutions take the differing forms that they do points to the variety of solutions to problems of Indigenous sovereignty...