Mens Grass Dance, Plains Indians Museum Powwow
Once upon a time, I interned and worked as a tour guide at the Center of the West, an institution that combines five museums under one roof, including the Plains Indian Museum (PIM). Since then, I’ve observed that the Plains Indian Museum is part of an encouraging trend: museums dealing with Native American history and culture are increasingly run, curated, or contributed to by tribal members. This is often manifested in three distinct and important improvements to the ways in which museums approach Native American history and culture.
Jillian’s recent post on Project 562 brings up two of the three improvements. The first is that stories are told by native people, not about them. The second, which does not apply to Jillian’s blog, is that objects and collections are being displayed in ways appropriate to their uses rather than as context-free works of art or anthropological curiosities. The third, which is key to the project and which lies at the heart of Jillian’s disappointment with so many New England museums, is that Native cultures can and should be defined by both their history AND their contemporary lives.
My experience as an intern makes me particularly familiar with the ways in which the Plains Indian Museum succeeds in each of these categories. This museum interprets the histories of numerous Plains Indian tribes through the voices and memories of tribal members. It displays objects in ways that contextualize their everyday uses, and it celebrates todayʻs Plains Indian cultures through its galleries and the powwow it hosts.
- Stories are told by Native Americans.
In some cases, rather than using interpretive text to describe the objects on display, the memories of Native American people provide the context for those objects. Curator Emma Hansen, a tribal member, works closely with Native American advisory board members who provide opinions and share their own stories. For instance, the recollections of Pretty Shield accompany a miniature tipi which is on display. Pretty Shield recounts her childhood; every time her family reached a new camp, her aunt would set up the familyʻs lodge, and she would set up her very small lodge. She would work as fast as she could, competing to try to get her lodge set up before her auntʻs. She comments that she did not know it at the time, but her aunt must have been letting her win. Some of the stories take the form of written quotations, while others play as audio in the vicinity of related items.
A wall bearing the title “Encounters” provides a seemingly simple timeline of Native-European encounters. The interactions detailed on the timeline are presented as text; written quotations by tribal members that detail the tragedies and disasters of their peopleʻs history with the white man. Hansen is protective of all her exhibits, but it is this one that she most strongly encourages tour guides not to interpret. There is no interpretive text on the wall either: the visitor is encouraged to engage directly with the words of the Native persons who speak about this painful history.
This is a very literal way of retelling history. Hansen has not only built her exhibits around broad constructions of a Native voice but has also built a wall on which specific people’s words are written, on which the stories of the Plains Indians’ histories are told by the descendants of the survivors, not the victors.
- Objects are displayed in ways appropriate to their uses.
Objects from the history of Native cultures have often been treated as either artwork or artifacts and therefore displayed either as objects of art or work. These displays are generally devoid of context, except for the occasional description of the materials used or as a fragment of a long-ago past. Contemporary exhibits have been successful at avoiding both camps and instead present objects as used items. These displays highlight craftsmanship and artistic skill, but the clothes are interpreted as clothes, not art. The weapons are weapons.
The PIM contains two tipis, both set up with appropriate items, like blankets and cookware, inside. A family of terra cotta mannequins and their animals, depicted during a migration, allow for the display of apparel, horse blankets, travois, parfleches, a cradle board and a quiver.
Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) Migration.
The figures and their animals offer ways to display items in their proper context and also represent the nature of traveling, and the reality of frequent travel, in a visual way. This display thoughtfully imparts information and serves as an example of how effectively objects can be displayed according to their original purpose, as things used and lived with daily. Such interpretation plays an important role in representing the lives of historic Native peoples. When the things they created and used regularly are neither art nor artifact, they can become relatable. When clothes are worn and weapons are carried they represent a historical reality that is understandable on a human level.
Presenting historical items in such a way contributes to the goal of representing Native Americans as regular people. While exhibits like those in the PIM celebrate the culture and history of Plains Indian tribes, they also combat the exoticism and “otherness” that has historically been perpetuated by displays in which Native American objects were categorized as curiosities.
- Cultures are defined through both their history and their contemporary lives.
The desire to represent contemporary Native American culture has found strong footing in Native American museums and exhibits. George Erasmus, the Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, described this wish—to support and exhibit living culture—in 1992: “We want to leave behind the relationship where museums pay attention to our culture of times long past. You have a phrase called “Golden Age.” We do not want to be depicted the way we were, when we were first discovered in our homeland in North America. We do not want museums to continue to present us as something from the past. We believe we are very, very much here now, and we are going to be very important in the future. Our cultures are in the middle of a strong resurgence.”
At the PIM, contemporary Native culture finds expression in both the gallery space and the annual Plains Indian Museum Powwow. In the gallery space, the “Honor and Celebration” exhibit moves chronologically, ending in the present, where modern powwow regalia is displayed and video footage of powwow dancers plays. The exhibit also contains examples of spectacular contemporary beadwork, some of which was commissioned especially for this exhibit. A fully beaded trucker hat in this display is a staff favorite, exemplifying the simultaneous combination of modernity and tradition.
The powwow has been held adjacent to the Center of the West since 1987. Unusual in the world of powwows for its lack of reservation affiliation, the annual powwow began organically and continues to be particularly welcoming and familial. This event both supports living culture and, in a sense, exhibits it. It makes contemporary Indian culture accessible and available to any visitors who are interested. There are dances in which everyone is invited to participate, and children who are happy to instruct the ignorant novice (read: me) on how to dance the simplest of dances.
Gloria, a local Lakota educator, can be found in the museum’s “educational tipi” where she shares her vast knowledge of her own Lakota culture as well as inter-tribal powwow culture. She chats with children, helping them get dressed in powwow garb—fixing a pair of leggings after a boy gets stuck in them and has to be cut free. The leggings belong to the museum, as does the tipi, but Gloria is the expert here. She knows just how to adjust the tipi flaps should it get too hot and stuffy, she knows which of the powwow garments are valuable and cannot be let out of sight. She can identify some of the drum groups by sound and tell stories about some of those who compete in the dances. When the tipi is quiet, she works on her own beadwork. Gloria is just one example of the way in which indigenous people present their history and culture as something ongoing. She doesn’t mention whether this is a conscious effort, but whether or not she specifically intends it, her presence, her knowledge, and her stories show that her culture is both living and historical. She is part of a long history, but she is no less a part of the present than anyone else.
This is the point her daughter—also an educator—admits to consciously making when she arrives to be a part of “Colorful Character of the West” later in the summer. This “Family Fun Day” includes a contemporary landscape artist, a first person interpreter dressed as a 19th-century cavalryman, forest service wildland firefighters, and an old-west one-room schoolhouse. The schoolhouse teacher is dressed for the turn of the century, but the Plains Indian Educator has chosen not to be. She wants the children she meets today to know that Indians do not exist only in the past but also in the present.
These educators and the museum programs they support help to show that Native culture exists in the present and to demonstrate the historical continuity of that culture. They tell the stories of the Oglala Lakota as they tell the stories of their own family and memories. They, and their counterparts at other institutions, share their knowledge, both of the culture they live today and the past their grandparents remembered. To do so is to fight for a broader American culture that more accurately remembers the histories of Native cultures and more fully recognizes their continued existence and cultural vitality.
By Kerry McDonough, Public History MA Student, Northeastern University
Photos courtesy of The Plains Indians Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West
Boston Public History 