Tricks of the Trade: Some Reflections on Anthropological CollectingAuthor(s): Douglas ColeSource: Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 28, No. 1, Art and Material Culture of the North AmericanSubarctic and Adjacent Regions (1991), pp. 48-52Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40316290 .

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TRICKS OF THE TRADE:

SOME REFLECTIONS ON

ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTING

DOUGLAS COLE

Abstract. Captured Heritage (Cole 1985) dealt with "the scramble for Northwest Coast artifacts" by museum collectors. This paper reflects on some of the reactions to the book, but also looks at current concerns about "appropriation," both as a synonym for theft and in its more general use of "to make one's own." It discusses the idea of museum artifact as plunder and trophy, suggesting that this is itself a simplification that can do an injustice not just to collectors but to the Natives who themselves exploited the commercial market for art and artifacts. While museum collections were made for Western audiences, the preservation of artifacts has allowed for a recent "reappropriation" by Natives, especially by Native artists.

Museum exhibitions of Native American materials, such as Out of the North, touch on some of the most crucial issues of contemporary museum and gallery policy: how and for what purpose they gathered their collections and how they now treat them through exhibition, access, loan, and even repa- triation. These are, at the same time, among the questions of most vital interest to many Native American people. I cannot write in any depth on the collections made among Inuit and Athapaskan peoples of the North, so I must limit my comments largely to those made among the Northwest Coast peoples, a cultural area stretching from northern Washington state through southern Alaska. The treatment of the art and artifacts by museums is, however, substantially the same for all cultural areas.

The issues of collection and subsequent treat- ment are contentious because they are filled with ambiguities. "Appropriation," the word most often used now to describe the treatment of Third and Fourth World art and artifacts by the Western world's museums, is replete with ambiguity. With

the apparently simple meaning of "to make one's own," it can be used as an innocent intellectual process of empathetic appreciation and under- standing, but may also be taken to denote forceful acquisition, even theft, of the objects or at least of their meaning and significance.

Many reviewers of Captured Heritage, my book on anthropological collecting on the North- west Coast, were quick to focus on the theme of theft, though I took pains to point out that, while theft was not uncommon, most objects were pur- chased according to market terms.1 Sally Price (1989), in her recent, widely-noted Primitive Art in Civilized Places, cites only thefts or, for the North- west Coast, an exceptionally deplorable forced sale in Alaska. From these selected examples she con- cludes that such "are the encounters that have sup- plied our museums, from the Museé de l'Homme to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the great bulk of their non- Western artistic treasures" (Price 1989:74).

This generalization is a simplification, unsubstantiated and, I would guess, unable to be

Douglas Cole, Department of History, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6 Canada

ARCTIC ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 48-52, 1991

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Cole: Reflections on Collecting 49

substantiated. The process was much more - or less - than plunder. The great bulk of Northwest Coast treasures in museums were collected quite differently and in a great variety of ways. There were ambiguities in the process, but they are not the simple travesties to which Price would reduce them. Nor are they necessarily, as Ludmilla Jor- danova (1989:34) would have it, "trophies" of victory, mastery, ownership, control, and domin- ion. Certainly they can be seen as a product of a colonial encounter, an unequal trading relationship in which, in the long run, the terms of trade were stacked in favor of the dominating economic sys- tem. Yet even that view lacks the whiff of field reality: that Natives entered the art and artifact mar- ket themselves, often exploited it for their own needs, and often welcomed the opportunities which it offered. Adrian Jacobsen found two West Coast villages so enthusiastic at the prospect of sales that they interrupted their winter dances to bring out their goods. George Dawson, engaged in a geological survey of the Queen Charlotte Islands, bought a few items offered by Chief Skedans and soon found himself "besieged by Indians with vari- ous things to sell." He was then taken up by Chief Klue, who was disgusted that he "had not been knowing enough" to offer items when Dawson had been in his area the week before. Klue and his friends "evidently brought their best things to cut out Skedan and his friends" (Dawson 1989:472).

In all this criticism, it is therefore important to maintain perspective. Indians were also partici- pants in the process. They had their own interests, their own values, and their own needs. The most easily collected materials were household items which, with the availability of new goods and mate- rials, had become obsolete. Horn spoons, stone tools, Native bristle brushes, wood bowls, cooking baskets, cedarbark mats, bows and arrows, were falling out of use by the time museum collectors ar- rived. They were willingly, probably eagerly, sold. Collectors gave them a value which, like yester- day's newspapers, they had lost. In reading Barbara Hail's account (1989) of Emma Shaw Colcleugh's collecting among Canada's northern peoples, one has difficulty reconciling the practice of this remarkable woman with Price's account of typical thefts or in equating the objects which she brought back with trophies of mastery or domination.

This view of the collector and the museum risks not merely making a travesty of the truth and of libeling quite decent collectors (most of them all the more vulnerable because they are dead). More seriously, there is a danger of patronizing arrogance in viewing Natives as naive victims of exploitative Westerners. Ralph Coe has written of "our failure to recognize that Indians have always traded" (Coe 1986:16). Traditional societies may not have been capitalist societies, but they were never noncom-

mereiai ones. Indians of the Northwest Coast were, from their first encounter with Europeans, famous for their trading ability, even notorious for their sharp practices. They had been involved in com- mercial exchanges since time immemorial. They knew how to trade, how to swing a deal to their advantage, how to capitalize upon a field collec- tor's haste, how to endow an article with a sacred function it may not have possessed, even how to fake new for old. Acculturation only increased their ability to trade well with Europeans. Indeed, there is probably a bias in our sources. Collectors will- ingly volunteered their success stories, of how they got something for a bargain price; they were less likely to record instances where they came out losers, where they were bilked by Natives. Indeed, some never realized that they had been had.

Appropriation, "to make one's own," is also used more broadly, more ambiguously. As Virginia R. Dominiguez wrote, in the most trenchant criti- cism of Captured Heritage, museums collected, less because of the importance of the objects to Indians, than because of what they told Europeans of themselves. Everything about the collections - the way they were collected, why they were col- lected, and why they were displayed - points to the European experience as part of a European effort at self-definition (Dominiguez 1986). This valuable insight has gained widespread currency. James Clifford writes of how anthropological collection and display were crucial processes of Western iden- tity formation (Clifford 1988:220). Jeremy Mac- Clancy, discussing contemporary private tribal- art collecting, writes of how the collector makes objects "but an aspect of himself. These appropri- ated items . . . become the specimens and trophies of his personal mythology" (MacClancy 1988:176). Sally Price repeats the theme for primitive art: "We partake of an identification with African art; this allows our self-recognition and personal rediscov- ery and permits a renewed contact with our deeper instincts; the result is that we increase our under- standing of ourselves and our relationship to art" (Price 1989:34).

This mode of thought has become almost fash- ionable. It seems part of a continuing self-criticism among anthropologists and tribal-art historians, a trend to which curators have also become ex- tremely sensitive. It is plainly true, though it does carry its own self-conscious self-reference. Yet much of what it says is almost obvious. People act, see, and understand as they have learned to act, see, and understand. They perform from their own experience. Moreover, the very point, made so sim- ilarly by Dominiguez, MacClancy, Clifford, and Price, is itself a product of a particular phase of the experience of Western postcolonial intellectuals. It could not have been made in the West of the 1920s nor, of course, in any non- Western area before at

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50 Arctic Anthropology 28:1

least 1950, if it appears there even now (Coote 1990:235). This relativism, if one may call it that, is one of the ambiguities of the argument and of the discourse.

Temporality plays a role in this and in much more. Museums and galleries are themselves West- ern inventions, the product of certain currents and factors within European culture. Museum and art collectors are Westerners and the concern for mate- rial heritage is as Western a phenomenon as is capitalism. Their appearance in the West was the product of historical factors and their subsequent introduction into Westernized societies is the prod- uct of historical factors both similar and distinct. The Third and Fourth Worlds never possessed them until they borrowed such institutions from the West. Native Americans retained heirlooms and treasures, even had what might be called schatz- kammern, but there were no Native museums. By the late nineteenth century there were museums of almost everything, a tendency that has continued until today. While anthropological museums often grew out of natural science museums, their growth in Europe was simultaneous and often associated with historical folk museums, a phenomenon to which "appropriation" can, except in a social sense, scarcely be applied. The museum, as an institution dedicated to acquisition, exhibition, and preserva- tion, was a European phenomenon. Preservation was its key justification in all areas of historical collecting, not least for the acquisition of Native American art and artifact.

Preservation is, of course, partly just that, a justification. Collectors had their own agenda, be it self-aggrandizement (personal or institutional), playing to peers, building a career, profiting from a transaction. Nevertheless, behind all acquisition, all "appropriation," lies this justification, essen- tially a moral one.

The museum 's quest for Native American artifacts was, aside from souvenir hunters, a con- cern with their preservation for science and poster- ity. Preservation, too, is largely a Western concept. The audience to which that preservation was di- rected was also a European one. Few, in the great age of museum collecting, collected objects from Natives for Native viewing. The collections origi- nally were made to be kept in European cities for display to European viewers. Even the museums of Seattle, Victoria, and Vancouver saw themselves as institutions for White visitors. This was natural and inescapable. Indians did not go to museums and it was virtually inconceivable that they would.

The exception was Sheldon Jackson's Sitka museum, founded in part to exhibit to "the coming generation of Natives how their fathers lived" (Jack- son 1893). But Jackson's museum was unusual, in large part an adjunct to a residential vocational school for Natives. For Franz Boas, for instance,

anthropological collections had to be in metro- politan centers. He felt that Northwest Coast objects should be preserved "in a large and accessible museum" (he had, of course, his own New York museum in mind), rather than "in a remote place like Victoria where, at best, few scientists will have a chance to see them." Even to have them in remote Victoria was, however, better than "to let them rot and be lost in private hands" (Boas 1897).

It is indisputable that, without museums col- lecting as they did, much of the material legacy of Native American peoples would have been lost to both European viewers and to a Native audience never envisaged by the original collectors and cura- tors. Some ceremonial pieces were supposed to be destroyed after use or when their owner died. The market in artifacts helped to save some of those, in one instance masks being passed through an open window at night by an anonymous vendor who received his payment the same way. One of Thomas Meli wraith's informants gave him some masks with the plea that "I keep them forever as I was more to be trusted with them than the young Bella Coolas" (Mcllwraith 1922). Mcllwraith did not, in fact, keep them forever, though the museums to which he passed them may, there to remain for the benefit both of young Mcllwraiths and young Bella Coolas.

The general Northwest Coast Indian view, even today, "is that objects are created to be used and when those objects are damaged or worn out, they are thrown away and new ones made." In part this is because the objects themselves are unimpor- tant; what matters is what the objects symbolize. "They represent the right to own that thing, and that right remains even if the object decays or is otherwise lost" (Webster 1986:77). Some Indians would maintain that it was wrong to salvage the old totem poles that now stand in museums; they should have been left to decay in their deserted village (Webster 1986:77; Ames 1986:46).

Sheldon Jackson's view, that something should be left for the Natives, was exceptional for the nineteenth century, but has become common- place now. Museums in today's Northwest are all conscious of their Native constituency. Some loan selected objects for ceremonial use, and all allow Native artists access to their collections. Most promote and patronize contemporary Native art. Even here, however, there are ambiguities about museums and "the Native point of view," about the value of museums to Native people, and about the use of objects (Ames 1986).

James Clifford turns another page in this story by describing the "reappropriation" by Indians of the museum experience. He cites the Kwakiutl U'Mista Cultural Centre as an example of how resourceful Native Americans, like those at Alert Bay, may yet appropriate the Western museum as they have made other European institutions their

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Endnote

References

Cole: Reflections on Collecting 51

own (Clifford 1988:248). In the 1970s, the National Museum in Ottawa returned to Native museums established in Alert Bay and Cape Mudge the pot- latch paraphernalia the federal government had taken from the Kwakiutl in the potlatch law pros- ecutions of 1922.

Certainly Northwest Coast Indians are now reappropriating museum-stored artifacts for their own use. In the great resurgence of Northwest Coast art since the 1960s, artists have turned repeatedly to illustrations from museum collec- tions, whether through photographs in exhibition catalogues and books or by personal visits to exhib- its and storage areas. Haida Robert Davidson has gone so far as to argue that "if it wasn't for the museum and if it wasn't for the anthropologists, I feel the art form would have died completely if nothing had been collected and saved" (quoted in Doráis 1986:3). Davidson's may be a minority view (and from a society where artistic continuities were probably less than among, say, the Kwakiutl), but others would, though with considerably more ambivalence, agree.

Many Indians remain indifferent toward museums, some are hostile. Kwakiutl Gloria Cranmer Webster, aware of the value of museum collections (though not so generous to museums and anthropologists as Davidson), has stressed the importance of access to them by Native people, especially artists, and of the need for loans of mate- rial for Native ceremonial occasions (Webster 1986:77-78). This, too, is part of the process of reappropriation, a process well advanced among Northwest Coast Natives. The artists have appropri- ated the Western art market and many aspects of Western art technique (the limited edition silk- screen print comes most immediately to mind); they have reappropriated their heritage in Western museums as a symbol of their culture; and, on occa- sion, they have even reappropriated the actual artifacts through repatriation to their own muse- ums. This mutual appropriation is summed up, in a sense, by Haida artist Robert Davidson's state- ment that "this art," meaning the museum collections from the Northwest Coast, "is a legacy and a resource for us and you" (quoted in Moss 1988:7).

1. Most of these, perhaps regrettably, were in the popular press. The Vancouver Sun headlined "They plundered what they could not buy" (13 July 1985); the Calgary Herald "Author reveals cultural pillage" (22 September 1985); and the Winnipeg Free Press "How anthropologists plundered a culture" (31 August 1985).

Ames, Michael M. 1986 Museums, the Public and Anthropology: A

Study in the Anthropology of Anthropology. University of British Columbia Press, Van- couver.

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