Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives

Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives

1 Contesting Knowledge Museums and Indigenous Perspectives susan sleeper-smith At the time of European encounter, the first residents of the Americas were divided into at least 2,000 cultures. The original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere did not conceive of themselves as one or even several nations. Most people knew very little about distant communities—awareness was often circumscribed by kin and trade networks. Consequently, because Indigenous peoples did not possess a collective vision of themselves , the idea of the Indian or Indians emerged as a white image or stereotype . Indians became a single entity for the purposes of description and analysis. Simultaneously, by categorizing all Indigenous people as Indians, the newcomers downplayed the differences between Indigenous peoples, leading to a centuries-long confusion and a melding of fundamentally incorrect ways of understanding human societies. When Columbus applied the term Indian to people in the Caribbean, its use became embedded in narratives of encounter and has continued to the present day. Even early eyewitness accounts that described a specific tribe or community were generalized and often evolved as descriptive of all Indians. Present-day people who use the word Indian have little idea of the diversity of cultures and of tribal communities that this term encompasses. Global expansion created new notions about human nature and embedded knowledge: about the types of societies that met across this stage of encounter in a wealth of objects that were collected from “foreign” cultures and transported to Europe. Many objects were received through the traditional exchange of goods; and, like written narratives, these objects were displayed as a way of telling stories about Indians. Museums, like literary texts, were also purposefully constructed to tell stories about 2 sleeper-smith Western, rather than Indigenous, society. When the objects collected for “cabinets of curiosity” were moved from the private to the public sphere, they visually reinforced the stereotypes associated with Indians. Notions about the “primitive” nature of Indian society influenced what was collected and how it was displayed. Most frequently, Indigenous peoples were described in terms of deficiencies. Consequently, Indians were measured against the ideals of Western society; and whether describing beliefs, values , or institutions, they were measured against the institutions that Western society most cherished about themselves at the time. The public museum became a meeting ground for official and formal versions of the past. Because history was constructed through objects, curators created the interpretative context for each object. Objects that were placed in museums were initially decontextualized and made to tell an evolutionary narrative about the progress of Western societies and the primitiveness of Indigenous communities. Museums functioned as powerful rhetorical devices that created dominant and often pathological allegiances to a cultural ideal. In the first section of this volume, Ray Silverman shows how these essays explore stereotypes about Indigenous people who shaped the early period of contact. In both Brazil and South Africa, violence was perpetuated against Native peoples and “just wars” were rationalized as a means of imposing a “civilized” order on Indigenous space. For instance, the inscription of “primitive” behaviors, which described Indigenous people as cannibals, raises important issues about how public exhibition space functioned. In displays of human beings as objects, we see how Africans were not silenced even when they allowed themselves to be exhibited. As Zine Magubane tells us, Those denied the opportunity to express themselves verbally used their bodies, facial expressions, and other nonverbal forms of communication to show that they were sentient beings who knew how humiliating their circumstance was and who wished to live differently. Those who mastered the language and mores of English society were more direct. They challenged the supremacy of English culture and values. They demonstrated their awareness of the shortcomings of English society . And they, like their silenced brethren, insisted on the necessity of independence and self-determination. Others chose the path of si- Contesting Knowledge 3 lence—showing their displeasure through a deliberate refusal to engage . And still others, like Ota Benga, chose death. In the Western exhibition of colonized people, the Indigenous voice could not be silenced. Initially, there were no Indigenous museums that described the horrors associated with colonization. As Jacki Rand points out, in the second section of this volume, it was only in the mid-twentieth century that Indigenous people were invited to share power with museum professionals. Museums that sought Indigenous consultation encouraged Native people to make a case for their own...