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"Bruchac, Margaret M"
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Savage Kin
In this provocative new book, Margaret M. Bruchac, an Indigenous anthropologist, turns the wordsavageon its head.Savage Kinexplores the nature of the relationships between Indigenous informants such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan), Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), and George Hunt (Tlingit), and early twentieth-century anthropological collectors such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas.This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era,Savage Kinfeatures some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac's decolonizing efforts include \"reverse ethnography\"-painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes-to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today.Savage Kinalso contains unexpected narratives of human and other-than-human encounters-brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies-that will move Native and non-Native readers alike.
eBook
Broken Chains of Custody: Possessing, Dispossessing, and Repossessing Lost Wampum Belts
In the spring of 2009, two historical shell bead wampum belts--identified as \"early\" and \"rare\" and valued at between $15,000 and $30,000 each--were advertised for sale at a Sotheby's auction of American Indian art objects belonging to the estate of Herbert G. Wellington. 3 One belt, identified as having been collected by Frank G. Speck from the Mohawk community in Oka (Kanesatake, Quebec) before 1929, was tagged with an old accession number from the Heye Foundation/ Museum of the American Indian. The Sotheby's notice caught the attention of the Haudenosaunee Standing Committee on Burial Rules and Regulations (HSC), a consortium of Six Nations Iroquoian chiefs, tribal historians, and community leaders who serve as advocates and watchdogs for tribal territory and cultural property interests. In sum, although both of the wampum belts advertised at Sotheby's were successfully reclaimed, this case study illustrates the pernicious influence of categorical and conceptual distinctions that continue to exert very real power over Indigenous patrimony.
Journal Article
Ephemeral Encounters
In this “report from the field,” we write from two perspectives, as a curator and as an advisor, on the process of interpreting Native American documents in the 2016 American Philosophical Society Museum exhibition, “Gathering Voices: Thomas Jefferson and Native America.” We share insights into our curatorial and representational goals, and reflect on the challenges of interpreting Indigenous heritage and traditional knowledges in materials that have been captured in colonial collections. We show how archival documents tend to silence as much as showcase ephemeral encounters, and how power in museum environments often remains embedded within the routine structures of colonial settler institutions and practices. We critique our own exhibition by noting how, despite our best efforts, inherent tensions among Indigenous histories, decolonizing ideals, and colonial archives shaped the process and resulted in irreconcilable omissions. Yet, we argue that cross-cultural collaboration is essential when working in colonial archives. Only by inviting Indigenous people into the process can we make progress toward restoring living relationships among past voices and contemporary communities. In concluding, we offer advice on practical approaches to working with Indigenous collaborators and advisors.
Journal Article
Hill Town Touchstone
The Pequot author William Apess is regarded as having almost miraculously transcended poverty, racism, and injustice to become an eloquent orator. Modern scholars have imagined the place of his birth as a primitive camp in the hills. Yet Colrain, in the early 1800s, was a bustling, religiously diverse, transcultural town where white (mostly Scots-Irish), Native American, and African American people routinely crossed paths, and where the Apess family routinely crossed color lines. Over time, Apess drew on his experiences among tribal, racial, and religious groups in multiple locales (Colchester, Colrain, Ledyard, Mashpee, Tyendinega, and elsewhere) to construct a compellingly romanticized (and colonized) version of indigenous identity. Onstage and in print, he was an iconic “poor Indian” and “son of the forest”; in person, he was a well-educated, cosmopolitan performer who loved the limelight and feared the wilderness. He evoked a precolonial ideal of a pristine Native life, while delivering trenchant critiques of white settler abuses; yet he advocated for religious conformity more than for indigenous survivance.1 Thus, to better contextualize Apess’ life and works, we need to critically and carefully consider nineteenth-century modes of identity formation, national affiliation, cultural performance, and racial tropes, including those articulated by Apess himself.
Journal Article
Ephemeral Encounters
In this “report from the field,” we write from two perspectives, as a curator and as an advisor, on the process of interpreting Native American documents in the 2016 American Philosophical Society Museum exhibition, “Gathering Voices: Thomas Jefferson and Native America.” We share insights into our curatorial and representational goals, and reflect on the challenges of interpreting Indigenous heritage and traditional knowledges in materials that have been captured in colonial collections. We show how archival documents tend to silence as much as showcase ephemeral encounters, and how power in museum environments often remains embedded within the routine structures of colonial settler institutions and practices. We critique our own exhibition by noting how, despite our best efforts, inherent tensions among Indigenous histories, decolonizing ideals, and colonial archives shaped the process and resulted in irreconcilable omissions. Yet, we argue that cross-cultural collaboration is essential when working in colonial archives. Only by inviting Indigenous people into the process can we make progress toward restoring living relationships among past voices and contemporary communities. In concluding, we offer advice on practical approaches to working with Indigenous collaborators and advisors.
Journal Article
Introduction
Names matter. They signify and communicate conceptions of identity, kinship, and power. Traditionally, my Algonkian Indian kin (like many other Indigenous peoples) do not live in a conceptual world governed by humans alone; they recognize the coexistence of “other-than-human” beings (animals, shapeshifters, ancestral spirits, natural forces, etc.) living side by side with humans. For the Ojibwe (also called Ojibwa and Anishinaabe), for example, all human and other-than-human beings are construed as “persons,” living causal agents with the capacity to manifest, transform, and direct power.¹ These beliefs were integrated into hunting, harvesting, and healing traditions and linked to specific locales in
Book Chapter
Finding Our Dances
It started with seawater. In 1883, two years after completing his PhD dissertation in physics, titled “Beiträge zur Erkenntniss der Farbe des Wassers” (Contributions to the understanding of the color of water), Franz Uri Boas (1858–1942) set forth on an expedition to Baffin Island in the Canadian north.¹ There, during a grueling winter while his ship was frozen in, he experienced his first in-depth encounters with Indigenous people. He had intended to study geography, water, and culture but soon found himself intimately dependent on Inuit technology for survival. He commissioned fur clothing from Inuit women, hired Inuit men as
Book Chapter