Connecting Politics and Culture
Museums are reflections of their society, they can push for change, create space for open dialogue and reflect on difficult stories of our past. Museum have also been used to boost nationalistic narratives, highlight the successes of a nation while ignoring the oppressions of those within it. Curators have their own lens and biases and may be further influenced by their management team, their board of governors or the interests of funders and donors. Museum like all forms of history are not neutral.
My research examines the history of Haudenosaunee museology within a political and cultural context to determine community initiatives and motivations that led to the formation of Haudenosaunee cultural organizations. Although Tsi Teyótte Karhá:kon (Edge of the Woods) and Condolence may not have explicitly directed the creation of these facilities, they now play an important role in providing space for contemporary expressions of these philosophies and I will demonstrate that these philosophies have always guided this work even at a subconscious level.
I will ask how they challenge the colonial discourse in museums which Benedict Anderson describes as “institutions of power” that shape “alternative legitimacies;” narratives that disposes and dissociate Indigenous peoples from their lands and heritage.[1]
From a Haudenosaunee perspective the museum is more than a holder of national narratives but a place to engage in culturally grounded healing and restitution. Much like the Indians of Canada Pavilion, the growth of these centers throughout the 1970s and into the early 1990s spoke to the need and desire in community for a new approach to Indigenous material culture and stories that would continue to challenge the broader museum community.
By the 1980s and 1990s, in conjunction with continued assertions of land rights, sovereignty and outcry against colonial policies, Indigenous peoples began to question the ethics of museum practice by mainstream institutions. When the 1988 The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada's First Peoples exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary displayed Haudenosaunee ceremonial masks without community knowledge or permission, the Kanienkehaka communities of Kahnawake, Akwesasne and Kahnasatake sought out a court injunction to prevent their display, although eventually overturned this action was followed up with a 1995 policy developed by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy which stated:
All wooden and corn husk masks of the Haudenosaunee are sacred, regardless of size or age…No institution has the authority over medicine masks, as they are the sole responsibility of the medicine societies and the Grand Council of Chiefs…The public exhibition of all medicine masks is forbidden. Medicine masks are not intended for everyone to see and such exhibition does not recognize the sacred duties and special functions of the masks. The exhibition of masks by museums does not serve to enlighten the public regarding the culture of the Haudenosaunee as such an exhibition violates the intended purpose of the mask and contributes to the desecration of the sacred image. In addition, information regarding medicine societies is not meant for general distribution…The non-Indian public does not have the right to examine, interpret, or present the beliefs, functions, and duties of the secret medicine societies of the Haudenosaunee. The sovereign responsibility of the Haudenosaunee over their spiritual duties must be respected by the removal of all medicine masks from exhibition and from access to non-Indians.[2]
In these contexts, the history of collecting Indigenous material culture, interpretations of cultural expression, the ethics of storytelling, and the impacts of colonialism became subjected to contested public debate.[3] Questions arose around who had the authority to speak for Indigenous collections, about the relationship of museums to source communities and about the role of museums as repositories versus trustees of collections. For example, in Anthropology Today, as a part of a debate between Julia Harrison, curator of the controversial exhibition The Spirit Sings, and anthropologist Bruce Trigger, Trigger stated:
I have long believed that museums hold native artefacts in trust for Native People; this heritage is not something that can be regarded as alienated from Native People...I therefore reject the argument which was put to me by some museum officials, that to support the boycott was to mix politics and culture, while to make the loan was to defend academic freedom[4]
These questions around who has authority to collect, display and speak to Indigenous material culture, and when and or even if material culture should be preserved in museums persist today in debates that center around intellectual authority, universal understandings, and mediation of knowledge[5].
Historians examining North American history have focused on the “contact zone” and “middle ground” as approaches to understanding Indigenous–non-Indigenous conflicts, negotiations, and relationships.[6] These two theories argue that within the physical spaces of colonial encounters between Indigenous peoples and settlers a negotiation or exchange of values, teachings and cultural practices occur leaving both parties altered in some way. Richard White views the middle ground as a specific space (both physical and philosophical) in which there is “a rough balance of power, a mutual need or desire for what the other poses, and an inability of one side to commandeer enough force to compel the other to do what it desired.”[7] While in some ways this lines up with Edge of the Woods its focus on a specific balance of power and authority rather relationship building still centers it in a very Eurocentric approach to relationship.
Marie Louise Pratt describes contact zones as tumultuous areas in which “asymmetrical relations of power such as colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world” – I would argue that this is very much the power dynamic that occurred historically in Western museums.[8] Instead of a middle ground or contact zone, I argue that Tsi Teyótte Karhá:kon and Condolence provide an Indigenous-centered theory through which to view the Haudenosaunee as “culture brokers” who controlled their relationships with non-Indigenous people through culturally grounded forms of negotiation and, importantly, by maintaining their connections to ceremony and core cultural values. This approach strengthens and builds on the work of scholars such as Julie Cruikshank, Susan Roy, and Susan Hill who have examined the ways in which Indigenous people assert their views of the past within specific cultural frameworks.[9] My work also challenges the notion that Indigenous material and expressive culture are only worthy of preservation as relics of the past; instead, it points to the ongoing connection of these objects (or as some have expressed relations)—through Indigenous museum practice—to land, history, and contemporary culture.
Because of this close connection of politics and culture, this research takes place with attention to national and international legal and policy developments in the area of Indigenous rights.[10]
For example, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), Article 8, Section 1 states:
“Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture;” and Section 2(a) further empowers communities by calling for states to: “provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities.”[11]
More specifically in Canada, the OCAP principles of Ownership, Control, Access and Possession, (developed by the First Nations Governance Centre in 1998 who operate with a specific mandate form the Assembly of First Nations), also directs this discussion - as OCAP principles seek to ensure that Indigenous peoples have control and direction over research in their communities; these serve as an important model for museums to consider.[12]
In "Basic Call to Consciousness", John Mohawk suggests that the Indian Rights movement was about collective rights, and a specific concept of sovereignty that we now term self-determination.[13] Within research the principle of self-determination has been expressed at the national and international level through UNDRIP and the principles of OCAP; as an Indigenous scholar it is my responsibility to ensure that I uphold these values throughout my work.[14] Including a rights-based perspective demonstrates the importance of Haudenosaunee museology to the political and social justice work undertaken by Indigenous people at national and international levels. My dissertation, Haudenosaunee Storytelling will contribute greater understanding of the value of Indigenous-centered histories in relation to political autonomy and sovereignty.
[1] Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. 163-164, 181; Susan Ashley, “State Authority and the Public Sphere: Ideas on the Changing Role of the Museum as a Canadian Social Institution,” Museum and Society 3, no. 1 (March 2005).
[2] Catherine, Bell and Val Napoleon, eds. First Nations Cultural Heritage and Law: Case Studies, Voices, and Perspectives (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008); and “Haudenosaunee Confederacy Announces Policy on False Face Masks,” Akwesasne Notes 1, no. Spring (1995).
[3] Task Force on Museums and First Peoples, “Turning the Page: Forging New Partnerships Between Museums and First Peoples 3rd Ed,” 1994, https://museums.in1touch.org/uploaded/web/docs/Task_Force_Report_1994.pdf.
Phyllis Mauch Messenger, The Ethics of Collecting Cultural Property: Whose Culture? Whose Property? (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).; Phillips, Museum Piece; Richard Hill, “Regenerating Identity: Repatriation and the Indian Frame of Mind,” in The Future of the Past: Archeologists, Native Americans, and Repatriation, ed. Tamara L. Bray (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001); Neal B. Keating, Iroquois Art, Power and History (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2012); Christina Kreps, “Indigenous Curation, Museums and Intangible Cultural Heritage,” Problems of Museology 8, no. 2 (2013)17-26.
[4] Julia D. Harrison and Bruce G. Trigger, “The Spirit Sings’ and the Future of Anthropology,” Anthropology Today 4, no. 6 (December 1988), 6-10.
[5] Joshua M. Gorman, “Joshua M. Gorman (2011) Universalism and the New Museology: Impacts on the Ethics of Authority and Ownership,” Museum Management and Curatorship 26, no. 2 (2011): 149–62, https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2011.566714.
[6]Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, 1991, 33–40.; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherford, eds., Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005); and John Sutton Lutz, ed., Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007).
[7] Richard White, The Middle Ground, XVII
[8] Mary Louise Pratt Arts of the Contact Zone, 34.
[9]Julie Cruikshank, “Negotiating with Narrative: Establishing Cultural Identity at the Yukon International Storytelling Festival,” American Anthropologist, New Series 99, no. 1 (1997): 56–69; David Hurst Thomas. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, Perseus Books, 2000); Susan Dion, “(Re)Telling to Disrupt: Aboriginal People and Stories of Canadian History,” Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 2, no. 1 (2004); and Phillips, Museum Pieces.; Susan Roy, These Mysterious People: Shaping History and Archaeology in a Northwest Coast Community, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2016); Susan M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018).
[10]Rene Dussault and Erasmus George, eds., “Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples” (Canada, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996), http://hdl.handle.net/1974/6874 ; “H.R. 5237 — 101st Congress: Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.” www.GovTrack.us. 1990. February 5, 2020 <https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/101/hr5237> ; UN General Assembly, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: resolution / adopted by the General Assembly, 2 October 2007, A/RES/61/295. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.18_declaration%20rights%20indigenous%20peoples.pdf; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume One: Summary. Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 2015.
[11] UN General Assembly, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 4.
[12] The First Nations Information Governance Centre, “Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP): The Path to First Nations Information Governance,” May 2014, https://fnigc.ca/sites/default/files/docs/ocap_path_to_fn_information_governance_en_final.pdf.
[13] Akwesasne Notes, Basic Call to Consciousness, 2nd ed. (Tennessee: Native Voices, 2005). 9.
[14] The First Nations Information Governance Centre, “Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP): The Path to First Nations Information Governance,” May 2014, https://fnigc.ca/sites/default/files/docs/ocap_path_to_fn_information_governance_en_final.pdf.
