No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession ed. by Tressa Berman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession ed. by Tressa Berman Carter Jones Meyer No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession. Edited by Tressa Berman. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press, 2012. xx + 261 pp. Notes, photographs, illustrations, tables, references, index. $34.95 paper. In April 2013, despite protest from the Hopi tribe and its supporters, 1.2 million dollars’ worth of Hopi “Friends,” masklike sacred objects, were sold at auction in Paris, France. The Hopi argued that they embodied living spirits, that they had been stolen from tribal lands in Arizona, and that they should be returned. A municipal court judge determined that the objects could not be considered beings; they were more akin to works of art, whose ownership could not be verified, and therefore could legally be sold. The Hopi wondered if they would ever have possession of their Friends again. The controversy surrounding the sale of these sacred items elucidates a pressing question facing Indigenous cultures today: who “owns” culture? What do “possession” and “ownership” mean for Native peoples seeking to recover their cultures, and the objects that express them, after centuries of subjugation, or appropriation, by the dominant culture? No Deal! is a cross-disciplinary essay collection, written by artists, museum curators, anthropologists, and art historians from Australia and North America, that examines these questions, both from Indigenous and western perspectives. The essays provide fresh, thought-provoking insights into the politics of contemporary Native art as they investigate creative ways by which Native artists engage the global art world in their efforts to repossess their art and their heritage. The collection is arranged thematically, enabling readers to easily see connections across topics and to understand that concerns raised in North America regarding contemporary Indigenous art have been raised in Australia as well. Such a cross-cultural approach makes the book especially valuable. The essays in “Aesthetics and Meanings” address the shifting meanings and values of works of art as they move from the locality where they were made to places of display, in museums, magazines, and mainstream media. The essays in “Possession and Identity” examine specific cases whereby Indigenous groups have sought to control rights to their art and its interpretation, and therefore protect their identity from legal and cultural infringements. “Public Reception” presents essays on Indigenous art in the public sphere, where institutions and artists struggle over ownership of objects and ideas. Although the dense, jargon-laden writing style of many of the essays will ensure an audience mainly of scholars, No Deal! nevertheless offers new, important avenues of inquiry into the politics of contemporary Indigenous art that will surely spark further research into controversies such as that of the Hopi in Paris. [End Page 391] Carter Jones Meyer Salameno School of American and International Studies Ramapo College of New Jersey Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln