10. Trends in Image and Design: Reflections on 25 Years of a Tribal Museum Era

Abstract

10. Trends in Image and DesignReflections on 25 Years of a Tribal Museum Era Patricia Pierce Erikson (bio) Although precedents to contemporary tribal museums emerged in the early 19th and 20th centuries, Native American communities founded their own museums predominantly in the latter half of the 20th century. The Makah Indian community of Washington State was one of them. Now in its 25th year, the Makah Cultural and Research Center (MCRC) shares the title of tribal museum with more than one hundred nationwide (Cooper 1996; Fuller and Fabricius 1994). The MCRC's 25th anniversary, marked by the exhibit, Clothing: Trends in Image and Design, is one of many important benchmarks in an era of tribal museums. The proliferation of tribal museums has coincided with a period when anthropology, including museum anthropology, has critically analyzed how power relationships have shaped the methodology, ethics, and research design of the disciplines (Marcus and Fischer 1986; Rosaldo 1993). Native American "source communities" have sought to clearly define and disseminate members' lifestyles, values, and concerns for themselves and the public. The result has been widespread development of community-based museums or collaborative representational projects (Phillips 2003). A large body of work crossing social sciences and humanities has argued that an imperial vision has for centuries distorted images and understandings of colonized people, reducing indigenous notions of humanity to Eurocentric constructions of an "authentic Other" (e.g., Fabian 1983; Said 1978). The academic study and representation of indigenous peoples has remained part of an ongoing legacy of this imperialism (Tuhiwai Smith 2002). Creating idealized versions of specifically Native American identity—some noble, some savage—has been part of this larger process. The appropriation and stereotyping of Native American identity have contributed to processes of nation-building and individual and collective identity production. Historically, "staging Indianness" has helped European Americans to create a uniquely "American" (as opposed to [End Page 271] European) identity (e.g., Deloria 1998), or a more "authentic" American identity for one region relative to another (Gleach 2003), or a nostalgic, antimodern identity. These appropriations have been accomplished through a creative, political practice that is older than the nation itself (Taylor 1990). The stereotypes inherent in representing Indianness and "playing Indian" have repeatedly overwritten the existence and persistence of actual Native American communities. As stereotypes, they replace complex and dynamic identities with often static and anachronistic pan- or pastiche Indian ones. Frequently, the "imagined Indian" has inhered to persistent narrations of Native American extinction (Hill 2000). Over time many of these modes of representation have become embedded in a variety of institutional practices, particularly those of museums (e.g., Hinsley 1994; Krech and Hail 1999; Ames 1992; Clifford 1991; Maurer 2000). Over the course of more than two centuries, however, American museums have diversified, reevaluated their social roles, and developed new exhibition strategies. Given the range of museums of art, history, natural history, ethnology, technology, and so forth, there is clearly no single concept of "the museum." Nonetheless, it is possible to map how various tropes and types of exhibition have structured the museum-going public's experience of distinctions, for example, those between "art" and "artifact" (Clifford 1988; Nason 2000; Penney 2000). It is also possible to discern how these conventions have been resisted or appropriated and modified by a growing cadre of Native American museologists and social scientists and some of their non-Native colleagues. Although Native American protests and resistance to ethnographic study, collecting, and exhibition began early in colonial and national history, these objections intensified and became more overt in the context of civil rights and feminist movements in the 1960s. Since that time, a wide array of Native American activists, scholars, and artists have challenged how their communities have been researched, analyzed, collected, and represented through ethnographies and museum installations (Cooper 1996). For decades Native American communities have complained that social scientific interpretations of cultural history have overlapped little with Native American oral history or perspectives (Mihesuah and Wilson 2004); moreover, the research process has been neither collaborative nor inclusive, and its objectives have seemed irrelevant to contemporary life (Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997). One of the many ways that Native communities have responded is to counteract Eurocentric depictions...