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- Convenors:
-
Andrea L. Smith
(Lafayette College)
Kaitlin McCormick (Brown University)
John Harries (University of Edinburgh)
- Stream:
- Worlds in motion: Cultural Heritage, Artefacts and Tourism/Mondes en mouvement: Héritage culturel, artefacts et tourisme
- Location:
- SCS C211
- Start time:
- 5 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites historiographic and ethnographic explorations of the habit of settlers to collect First Nations artefacts. By attending to these practices we suggest a critical diagnostic of the ambivalent articulations of settler nativism vis-à-vis the material fact of aboriginal inhabitation.
Long Abstract:
This panel draws together historiographic and ethnographic explorations of the peculiar habit of white settlers and their descendants to assemble and keep collections of First Nations artefacts, often through the exploration of local landscapes in order to disclose the traces of previous dwelling that reside therein. There has been considerable attention given to the assembly of institutional collections developed through professionally-sanctioned acquisition (or looting) of indigenous material heritage, particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries. There has, however, been less attention paid to the motivations and activities of these "amateur" collectors and what their work reveals about the fashioning of, what Andrea L. Smith has called, "settler historical consciousness" and the ways in which settler populations relate to, and constitute, the absence/presence of indigenous peoples with their territorial imaginings, both at a national and often profoundly local level. Such imaginings, we would suggest, are indivisible from forms of material practice, including the discovery and unearthing of things belonging to First Nations peoples, and by attending to these practices we invite a critical diagnostic of the ambivalent articulations of settler nativism vis-à-vis the material fact of aboriginal inhabitation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Andrea L. Smith (Lafayette College)
Paper short abstract:
Through ethnographic research, I explore the meaning of First Nation artifacts to amateur archaeologists in Pennsylvania and New York States.
Paper long abstract:
Collections of First Nations artifacts adorn homes and historical societies across the United States and Canada. Amateur archaeologists collect arrowheads and other items, mount them in frames, and put them on display, and many local historical museums have the management of such collections as their original raison d'être. In this paper I examine the motives of amateur archaeologists and the meanings of their collections. Inspired by the agenda of the "bones collective" (Krmpotich, Fontein and Harries 2010) and settler-colonial theory, I ask what it is about these artifacts that "provokes emotional, political, visceral and intellectual responses from those that encounter them?" (Ibid: 371).
Settler colonialism generates patterned ways of framing the national past (Smith 2011). Through "acts of erasure" eliminating references to colonialism, a "settler imaginary" is created (Kosasa 2008: 196) that generates an "aesthetic of blankness." Settlers are educated not to see colonial practices, creating "a perplexing situation where many settlers are unaware of the existence of colonialism and their participation in it" (Ibid). And yet in many regions of the United States, artifacts are evident across the land, piercing "the fantasy of a tabula rasa" (Veracini 2015:41). Through ethnographic research with collectors and their collections in northern Pennsylvania and southern New York States, I interrogate the meaning of the artifact and the collection process to the settlers involved. While some amateur archaeologists use artifacts to claim indigeneity, others use them to challenge the "blankness" of the settler imaginary and address distortions in the national historical narrative.
Andrea Laforet (Carleton University)
Paper short abstract:
Between 1860 and 1930 settler women in the Fraser Valley developed private collections of coil basketry. This paper explores the relationship between basket makers and collectors and the contribution of the collections to the history of Fraser Valley coil basketry.
Paper long abstract:
The Fraser Valley of British Columbia, the traditional territory of the Sto:lo peoples, was settled rapidly by people of European ancestry between 1858 and the early 1900s. Although there are substantial institutional collections of cedar root coil basketry made by the Lil'wat, Tsleil-Waututh, Stl'atl'imx and Nlaka'pamux, neighbours of the Sto:lo who speak related languages, there are very few institutional collections of coil basketry from the Fraser Valley, even though, and perhaps because, the stylistic of coil basketry in this region was fairly dynamic at the time. There are, however, private collections developed by non-Aboriginal settler women through patron relationships with First Nations basket makers who lived in or visited the Fraser Valley. Certain of these private collections have been acquired by museums, usually local museums, either on the death of the collector or following the death of a daughter or other family member who inherited the collection. The private collections that can be documented as to time and place are now vital to an understanding of the history of coil basketry in that region and in that time period.
Kaitlin McCormick (Brown University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the collections of Emma Shaw Colcleugh as a window into the various social and cultural conditions encountered by collectors of Indigenous material culture in North America at the end of the nineteenth century, and how those conditions shaped the character of their collections.
Paper long abstract:
The private ethnographic collections of New England schoolteacher Emma Shaw Colcleugh (1846-1937) have been called the "jewel" of Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum. In the exhibition and catalogue Out of the North (1989), curators Barbara Hail and Kate C. Duncan showcased the 68 Cree, Anishinaabe, Métis and Tlicho works Colcleugh collected as invaluable pieces constituting the Haffenreffer's Subarctic collections. A tireless traveller and lecturer, Colcleugh made a number of trips to the Northwest in the late nineteenth century, and was a passenger on the Northern Pacific Railway's first journey to the Northwest Coast in 1884. Publications have raised the profile of Colcleugh's Subarctic collections (Hail and Duncan 1989; Hail 1991), but the 47 pieces that she collected on three separate trips to the Coast, while well-documented, are less understood.
Writing in the late 1980s, Hail and Duncan contributed to the development of novel conceptual frameworks for analysing colonial-era collections. Their analyses accounted for the gender, motivations and taste of collectors, collectors' relations with Indigenous makers in source communities, the social and cultural conditions of source communities and the character of the objects. In light of this ever-productive methodological and conceptual framework, this paper will introduce Colcleugh's Northwest Coast collection through a biographical lens. Unlike her women-oriented Subarctic collections, this one contains a higher proportion of male-oriented works. Why? This paper uses Colcleugh's Northwest Coast collection as a window into the different social and cultural circumstances encountered by private collectors of Indigenous material on their travels at the close of the nineteenth century.