Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah Cultural and Research Center / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah Cultural and Research Center / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0803267568
- ISBN-13:
- 9780803267565
- Pub. Date:
- 10/01/2005
- Publisher:
- Nebraska Paperback
- ISBN-10:
- 0803267568
- ISBN-13:
- 9780803267565
- Pub. Date:
- 10/01/2005
- Publisher:
- Nebraska Paperback
Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah Cultural and Research Center / Edition 1
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Overview
Patricia Pierce Erikson is an independent scholar who has taught cultural anthropology at Smith College, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern Maine. Helma Ward (1918-2002) was a Makah elder who served twenty-two years as a Makah language specialist for the MCRC. Kirk Wachendorf is an interpretive specialist at the MCRC who draws upon his experiences as a Makah tribal member and his previous archaeological work to provide public programming. Janine Bowechop is the MCRC's executive director.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803267565 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska Paperback |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2005 |
| Edition description: | Revised ed. |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Patricia Pierce Erikson is an independent scholar who has taught cultural anthropology at Smith College, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern Maine. Helma Ward (1918–2002) was a Makah elder who served twenty-two years as a Makah language specialist for the MCRC. Kirk Wachendorf is an interpretive specialist at the MCRC who draws upon his experiences as a Makah tribal member and his previous archaeological work to provide public programming. Janine Bowechop is the MCRC’s executive director.
Read an Excerpt
Voices of a Thousand People
The Makah Cultural and Research CenterBy Patricia Pierce Erikson Helma Ward Kirk Wachendorf
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2002 University of Nebraska PressAll right reserved.
Chapter One
Anthropologists in Neah BayPast and Present
Colonialism and the Collecting of Makah Culture
It was January 1863, the rainy season, and James Gilcrest Swan was preparing dried sponges, evergreen boughs, and whale skin barnacles to ship to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington dc. Swan was a teacher for the Office of Indian Affairs Agricultural and Industrial School in Neah Bay, Washington. For more than a year he had been collecting natural history specimens, with assistance from some Makah individuals, and he intended the items for the national museum's natural history collections.
Several other government agents, travelers, and residents across the western territories had, like Swan, been solicited by the Smithsonian to gather collections from the field (Cole 1985, 12). Before 1863, Swan had focused on collecting what we would readily recognize today as natural history specimens: rocks, plants, fish, sand, and other aspects of the natural environment. Although Swan had not yet focused his collecting on expressions of Makah culture, in January 1863 he slipped into the shipping crate a cedar bark mat, baskets, and a description of how black alder bark was chewed to make a dye. This was Swan's first foray into collecting Makah culture - both materialculture and traditional knowledge. Soon, however, the focus and fervor of his collecting would center on Native American cultures on the Northwest Coast.
Not long after packing this crate in January 1863, Swan received a circular from the Smithsonian Institution titled Instructions for Research Relative to the Ethnology and Philology of America. The circular informed Swan, and the others who received it, of a search for the origin of America's indigenous peoples that would "trace the migrations and conquests of the various nations that composed it from one part of the continent to another, to disclose their superstitions, their manners and customs, their knowledge of the arts of war and peace - in short, to place before us a moving panorama of America in the olden time - such is the purpose which the scientific ethnologist has in view, and to accomplish which he neglects no source of information that promises to cast even a single ray of light into the obscurity with which the subject is surrounded" (Gibbs 1863, 7). This circular would significantly change the direction of Swan's collecting. It was a call to assist the Smithsonian in "extending and completing its collection of facts and material relative to the Ethnology, Archaeology, and Philology of the races of mankind inhabiting, either now or at any previous period, the continent of America" (Joseph Henry in Gibbs 1863, 1).
The circular bolstered Swan's eagerness to collect what were then called "Indian curiosities." In response to it, Swan wrote to Spencer Baird, assistant secretary at the Smithsonian:
I noticed in Mr. Gibbs paper in the report of the Smithsonian Institution relative to the collection of Indian curiosities the fact that all such collections will be of interest. There are few Indians that have come under my observation who have more of such articles than the Makah people. Everything pertaining to their fisheries both of whale and smaller fish, their canoes, spears, harpoons, ropes and lines, fish hooks, knives, mats, baskets, dog hair blankets, bark blankets, wooden ware, tools, etc. all are objects of interest, and a collection of these with description of their manufacture and uses could not fail of being attractive objects in your collection.
This letter became just one of many Swan wrote to express his personal interest in Northwest Coast cultures and his eagerness to serve as an ethnologist who would collect from and document these cultures.
Swan's correspondence with Baird and others reveals his perception that the Smithsonian Institution embodied a heroic scientific project, one he was both enamored with and humbled by. Self-conscious about his perceived lack of appropriate training for his task, Swan referred to his collections and ethnological contributions as "trash." In a letter to Baird he confessed that his "desire to be of some service, however humble to the scientific world, is great and you may rest assured that while I remain here I will endeavor to fulfill your expectations."
Beginning with the first recorded contact between Northwest Coast Native peoples and Europeans late in the eighteenth century, collecting Indian curiosities was one of the duties of government-backed expeditions - such as those of Alejandro Malaspina for Spain and George Vancouver for England. Since the sixteenth century, the main motivations for colonial expeditions in or near the Pacific Northwest had been exploring and claiming territory, finding more efficient navigation routes, and identifying new trade goods and markets (Hayes 1999). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sea otter furs became one of these highly sought after trade goods. On these expeditions, explorers traded for items that were integral to Native daily and ceremonial life (Gunther 1972). Explorers and merchants also commissioned the creation of objects especially for collections, and they took items from grave sites (Cole 1985, 1- 8).
The collecting associated with colonial expeditions constitutes a significant stage in the history of museums and their relationship with Native American peoples. A large portion of these expeditions predate the profession of anthropology, but they are linked nonetheless. Nation-building projects and scientific collecting have shared a symbiotic relationship in many locations around the world (Anderson 1991; Cole 1982, 1985; Handler 1988; Pratt 1992; Trennert 1974). Projects to map and claim territory, such as the Wilkes Expedition in 1838 and the Cascade Mountains Route Survey, provided incentive and support for blossoming scientific professions (Richards 1990; Viola 1985, 23). In turn, science has offered to expeditions various methodologies to further national interests. The cultures of Native American peoples were valued by a young American nation hungry for a ready-made human history of some antiquity. Hinsley has argued that monumentalizing Native American cultures created "symbolic capital for the legitimation of a grounded national culture" (1993, 112).
In this sense, Swan's natural history collecting was an extension of the efforts being made to colonize Washington Territory and incorporate its indigenous populations. The material culture and knowledge of Makah and other peoples were considered part of this natural history. Developing a taxonomy of Native peoples was another aspect of charting colonized terrain. In his correspondence with the Smithsonian Institution, Swan describes the ties between himself, Washington Territory governor Isaac Stevens, the Indian Bureau, and the Smithsonian. Swan was relying on the same politico-economic systems related to treaty-making and territorial settlement would support the collecting of Makah culture in the five villages of the tribe (see McDonald 1972 and Cole 1985, 9- 47).
When Congress established the Smithsonian Institution, it charged it with receiving all specimens belonging to or thereafter belonging to the United States (Rhees 1901, 433). Hence, Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry asserted in an 1870 letter to the secretary of the Board of Indian Commission: "the duty of this country [is] to collect and preserve all the relics possible of the races-of-men who have inhabited the American Continent.... [The tribes] are rapidly disappearing and their original modes of life continually undergoing changes" (in Cole 1985, 13). In order to preserve the essence of this early American history, any and all objects that might help to discover and monumentalize the indigenous inhabitants were collected. There was an urgency to this collecting of Indian knowledge and material culture that stemmed from the Vanishing American paradigm: the belief that Native Americans were a vanishing race due either to physical or cultural extinction.
The popular concept that Native tribes were passing away was supported by several factors, only two of which I'll mention here. First, tribal populations across the country were being decimated by diseases of European origin from which they had no immunity. Baird asserted that, in essence, collecting was salvaging the remains of these dying Indian cultures (Lohse and Sundt 1990, 89). The Makah people were not exempt from extreme population losses. Records from earliest contact suggest the Makah population may have numbered in the thousands. George Gibbs reported that a Makah named Flattery Jack, or Yallakub, spoke of times prior to smallpox when the Makah people had five hundred fighting men. Flattery Jack contrasted that with their total population in 1853 of five hundred individuals (Taylor 1969, 20).
A second factor encouraging the Vanishing American paradigm was that Native Americans were adopting and adapting objects of non-Indian manufacture and substituting them for traditional items. The Smithsonian circular conveyed this urgency to Swan: "the tribes themselves are passing away or exchanging their own manufactures for those of the white race. It is hardly necessary to specify any of particular interest, as almost every thing has its value in giving completeness to a collection" (Gibbs 1863, 4). These patterns of consuming European goods began as early as the eighteenth century (Gunther 1972). Swan reports that early in the Makah reservation's history, in the 1860s, Makah people were using Euro-American items as luxurious courtship gifts and as specialty foods at feasts.
A portion of the nineteenth-century urgency for collecting was directed at human skeletal material. The first item listed on the Smithsonian circular that Swan read was human crania. The argument went that massive quantities of skeletal, or human osteological, data were needed in order to chart out what were called the different "stocks" of the "American race." Thus, the Smithsonian Institution asserted that the discovery and mapping of this racial history would require accumulating "as many [cranial] specimens as possible of each tribe" (Gibbs 1863, 3). The circular forewarned Swan that "The jealousy with which they [Native peoples] guard the remains of their friends renders such a collection in most cases a difficult task" (Gibbs 1863, 2). Despite the warning that Native Americans would resist grave robbing, the Smithsonian encouraged collectors to proceed "without offense to the living." This included collecting from graves of extinct tribes, relocated tribes, victims of war, and slaves. Based on Swan's correspondence with the Smithsonian, and on the Smithsonian's collection records, we know that Swan followed the directive to collect Makah human remains. Like other collectors, he collected from graves. Swan recorded that he gathered what he "believed to be heads of chiefs or prominent men, as no slaves are ever buried in that place [where he gathered them]." This material, discussed in Bray et al. (1994) has been subsequently repatriated to the MCRC and reburied.
In addition to human skulls, the Smithsonian sought Native weapons, implements, utensils, clothing, and other manufactured goods. Over a twenty-year period, Swan complied with these instructions by sending a plethora of Makah materials to the Smithsonian: cradles, headdresses, mats, baskets, model canoes and gear, dog hair blankets, bark capes, and much more.
Makah people were not passive victims of Euro-American policies and practices, however. Certainly, Makah sealers, fishermen, students, and artists interacted extensively with Euro-American agents, businessmen, teachers, and missionaries beginning with early contact in the 1700s and intensifying in the 1850s in the treaty and reservation period. The traces of their conversations with each other in diaries, reports, and oral history show a considerable amount of resistance and accommodation among all parties involved. Makah people resisted, adapted, and survived in a variety of ways, sometimes at the cost of creating new intratribal divisions. At other times, accommodation created new forms of cohesiveness. Not all Euro-Americans regarded Makah people in the same light.
Swan had heard that the Makah people had previously assisted British collecting expeditions off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Perhaps in response, he solicited their aid in his natural history collecting. Swan's overwhelming duties as a teacher, census taker, and sometimes physician led to his nearly total reliance on Makah individuals for collecting natural history specimens. Nonetheless, Swan complained bitterly about his Makah assistants: "I have been trying to get the Indians to collect bird skins for me. I have several, but they are hardly fit to send, as I cannot as yet make the savages understand the proper method of skinning them."
Since he was a teacher, Swan was most effective persuading the children to help him. Swan felt that by encouraging the children to collect natural history specimens he was teaching them a valuable lesson about the productivity of their labors and was making them "useful." He hoped that while assisting in the collection and preparation of natural history specimens, Makah children would reevaluate things in nature for their potential value as commodities. He also hoped to train them in "the scientific enterprise."
While some Makah people participated in natural history collecting, others apparently resisted it. While Swan encouraged the Makah people to collect shells and bird skins, eggs and nests, the elders disapproved of his using children to collect for him. In his diary Swan attributed this to what he called superstitions and the "sturdy though peaceful opposition of the old men."
To counteract Makah resistance, Swan offered what he called "considerable" sums of money to the children. Initially the children avoided Swan's requests to collect birds nests. They said they feared that taking the eggs would incite all birds to attack them and pluck out their eyes before they reached home. Eventually, with ever greater financial encouragement, the children brought baskets of sand to Swan, and he picked out the shells, or sent them along to Baird - baskets, sand, shells, and all - just as the children brought them. The children seem to have found a way to negotiate between opposing points of view.
Swan's diary does not enable us to fully understand why Makah people resisted shell collecting. We can, however, get a glimpse of the distinctly different worldview that shaped Swan's view of collecting practices. In 1862 a wounded bear attacked a Makah man named Karoquot and bit him in the thigh and in the hand, severing part of his hand. Swan recorded that the Makah people killed the bear and brought the skull to him after they completed a spiritual use for it. He recorded: "I wanted it for a specimen but it was not perfect as the larger teeth had been knocked out by the Indians to make medicine of to be used to cure the wounds of Karoquot." Swan was concerned with the structural perfection of the bear skull as specimen. The Makah people involved appear concerned about balancing the healing powers of the bear with receiving potential rewards from Swan for providing him with a specimen.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Voices of a Thousand People by Patricia Pierce Erikson Helma Ward Kirk Wachendorf Copyright © 2002 by University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission.
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