THE WAR SHIRTS
DRK was opposed to opening up “Medicine Bundles” or listing and photographing the insides. To explain his feelings, he said, “Suppose you found your beloved grandmother sprawled in public with her clothes torn aside so her frail old body was exposed to public view. Her unguent smells and threadbare undergarments, the things she wore as necklaces against her skin because of their power and intimacy. This is how I feel about an opened Bundle.”
It wasn’t about politics or science or privacy or justice. It was about the emotional connection, indeed, physical connection to what in the indigenous sense of things was a “person”. Indeed, many of the objects in museums are made of the bodies of animals, flesh and fur and feathers. Mixed in are bits of bone and stone from the places where they lived. Their significance is not a metaphor but an aspect of what they were: the bouncing otter, the scrambling badger, the soaring bird, their ambiance, their susuration in the air. their bubbling in the water.
Spoken words are thin transient puffs that represent these things, but the actual feel of them, their smell, their body heat, their panting and licking, their clever feet feeling the ground — none of these things are in words. One must stay still, watch, until you know what it’s like to be this creature and what your mind extending into theirs tells you something about the world.
Even skinned and cured, the spirit abides. It is better to sing a song, help remember with a drumming reproduction of their movement. This will connect you with the world more tightly, remind you what is important and what should be discarded, the way your grandmother would.
Museums come from several sources. One is to save the spoils of war, or maybe just empire, and showing the folks back home the exotic things you seized. Another has its source in the early Pope’s cabinets where they saved the gifts important people brought in hopes of gaining favor. They were increasingly valuable in the terms of rulers, which were shiny metals and precious stones. Some of them were clever. All were meant to impress.
Middle-class Americans imitate those they envied in Europe and so they seized and accumulated what they could. The governments themselves and religious institutions like the Roman Catholic church were sent many things that seemed fascinating but weren’t all that valuable yet. The competition among those who owned the most, had the best, acquired the earliest, began to support curators who put price tags on bits of what had been life-in-place without knowing anything about that place or that life. They were like insurance adjustors who say how much money you get if you lost your leg or if your child died in an accident. They don’t pay much when your grandmother dies. Nothing is enough.
In 1949 when I was in the 4th grade, my teacher Mildred Colbert who was a Chinook Indian elder, took the class on a tour of the newly acquired Axel Rasmussen collection of Northwest Coast Art at the Portland Art Museum. In the middle of the large shadowy hall was a Potlatch canoe that would have been filled with food and gifts. Around the walls were impressive big masks, some of which opened to second faces. The Northwest Peoples, whose main resources were salmon and abundant trees, were wealthy beyond Popes, so much so that they had ceremonies of giving things away, not hoarding them in cupboards and closets. This world outlook is uncommon and resulted in much vivid art, shared housing, and records of relationship carved from standing trees.
The hall of those things may not exist now, but be stored away. But I remember them vividly. I did know the rain and the trees, the salmon and sound of wooden boats. I knew the smoke. It wasn’t a picture book of things.
This is what the indigenous people are talking about when they say they are “reawakening” Bundles, bringing them back to life. It’s not just remembering the ceremonies, the liturgy, inhabiting the lives of the place they came from, but also knowing the faces of the circle who sat with the drumming, tasting sarvisberry soup. If the Bundles are always being opened, counted, recorded, argued about and maybe subject to bits of theft — maybe just the little buckskin pouches of pigment — that breaks the specialness of the right time and place, the people who can feel the memories rise up around them into a cathedral that is place itself, not just a building.
Museums, which are cultural and therefore washed over by movements and thought changes, have become aware of all this. A remarkable essay called “Ceremonies of Renewal: Visits, Relationships, and Healing in the Museum Space” by Laura Peers, addresses this beautifully. https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/museum-worlds/1/1/air-mw010109.xmlAxel Rasmussen’s collection of Northwest Coast art,
“In 2010, the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford (PRM) loaned five historic Blackfoot shirts to the Glenbow and Galt museums in Alberta, Canada. The project team held handling sessions at each museum, enabling over five hundred Blackfoot people to see and touch the shirts, unmediated by glass cases. Collected in 1841, and decorated with porcupine quillwork, paint, and human and horse hairlocks, the shirts are important heritage objects. For Blackfoot people, they are also ancestors, embodying the spirits of those who made and used the shirts. Having been absent so long from their communities — along with nearly all hairlock shirts, which were collected during the colonial era — their presence and multisensory engagements with them provoked powerful responses.”
The curators were moved by the gentle hands of the People who treated the shirts as the lined face of their grandmother. Scientists say that our bodies are containers for the neurological electrochemical code records of the world. Each sensation of buckskin, scalplock, quill or bead went in code pulses through the neural networks of the People into the brain cells where they were preserved as molecular permanent records, now physiological parts of their being, their memories and evidence of life. This makes them whole.
