At the Indian Museum, Evidence of Abundance
By Paul Richard
Monday, February 6, 2006; Page C01
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/05/AR2006020501138.html
If you didn't know better you'd think you were in an art museum.
Even though it's in the National Museum of the American
Indian, "Listening to Our Ancestors: The Art of Native Life Along the
North Pacific Coast" sure looks like an art show. Its mood is one of
opulence. It includes 400 objects. All of them are eye-catchers. Most
of them are old.
If You're Planning a Visit
"Listening to Our Ancestors: The Art of Native Life Along the North
Pacific Coast" remains on exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of the American Indian, Fourth Street and
Independence Avenue SW, through Jan. 2, 2007. Cultural
representatives from 11 Northwest coast communities...
The new museum, as it keeps insisting, is not a gallery for art, it's
a place about Indians, of, for and by them. To make that point
explicit, and to let the viewer feel the grain of modern Indian life,
rougher exhibitions elsewhere in the building offer baseball caps,
casino chips and the like, but there's none of that stuff here.
Instead, we're shown a Tsimshian mask carved 200 years ago whose
freckling of woodworm holes lets us see how old it is. A huge canoe-
shaped feasting bowl (Heiltsuk, 1860) still shines from the fish oil
that it once contained. That 16-foot harpoon is a weapon smoothed by
years of use. This show has a patina. It's got the dignity of age.
While historians of the Renaissance need not be Italian to discourse
on Leonardo, this new museum feels that one had better possess Indian
blood to speak of Indianness.
"Our guiding principle," writes the director, W. Richard West
Jr., "is that Native people are the keepers of wisdom when it comes
to Native cultures; it is only through indigenous knowledge and
authority that we gain a true understanding of 'the art of Native
life.' "
In accordance with that policy 11 different teams of "cultural
representatives" chose the objects shown. Almost all were drawn from
the museum's permanent collection -- Haidas chose the Haida things,
Tlingits chose the Tlingit. It seems a miracle that all of those
committees haven't splintered the display.
In 1937, when founder Andrew W. Mellon began to organize what would
become the National Gallery of Art, he deeded to the nation all of
his costly paintings -- 111 pictures. In 2004, when the new Indian
Museum opened to the public, it already owned 800,000 Indian things.
Few viewers would have guessed it. The museum's vast collection
wasn't on the Mall. Most of it, instead, was stashed in Suitland. The
museum's new exhibit plumbs the trove it owns.
Lots of Indian groups once prospered on the coast between Seattle and
Alaska, where all of these things were made. The Coast Salish, for
example, include more than 57 tribes and bands. The Tsimshian people
recognize 13 different Tsimshian tribes. How much they had in common
is apparent in this show.
Most of them, for instance, were relatively rich. For this they
thanked their foggy coastal landscape and the plenty it produced.
Deer grazed in the forests, salmon swam the rivers, grouse fed in the
meadows, whales cruised the seas. Opalescent seashells were easily
acquired. Copper was available (the coppers on display throughout the
exhibition were a major sign of wealth). The paintmakers provided a
great variety of colors. The spoonmakers made ladles from the steamed
horns of the mountain goat. And the woodworkers exploited a wonderful
supply of varied hardwood trees. Some of these were huge. The Coast
Salish in their prime produced seagoing canoes that could hold a
hundred men. You don't need to be rich to surround yourself with art.
But it helps.
It also helps to live among a skilled and settled people. While
following the buffalo, the Indians of the Plains took their
possessions with them. The Mesa Verde cliff dwellers had to carry
what they owned up notched poles to their homes. You can't take along
a "totem pole," a throne as big as a sofa, or a hundred-man canoe
while climbing a ladder or riding a horse.
Frugality, one gathers, was never much in fashion among the people of
the coast. Their door posts and chief's chairs, their coppers and
their weavings, and their wonderful wood hats insistently suggest
they spent a lot of effort declaring their high status, their taste
and generosity, by showing off -- and handing out -- proof of their
great wealth.
The costs of a great potlatch -- where the feasting was elaborate,
and lengthy, and all the guests got gifts -- might leave the host
near-broke. Which only added to his honor. And as soon as he was able
he'd go through it all again. Some of the wooden hats on view are
crowned by wooden disks the size of hockey pucks, one disc for each
potlatch given by the wearer. Among the hats displayed is a 19th-
century black bear headdress once owned, says the label, by Chief
Walsk of Gitsiis. It has six disks on its top.
Once upon a time, before incomers oppressed them, the Indians of the
coast, like many other kinds of people, spent a lot of time and
effort warring on each other.
Among the least expected objects on display is an early 19th-century
suit of Tlingit armor. The hat, of carved wood set with shells, was
surely made to terrify. It presents a mighty fish's mouth set with
twinkling teeth. The shirt is made of walrus hide. Over it was worn a
clanking suit of mail made entirely of tied-together Chinese coins.
The show encourages us to wonder how a modern Tlingit would feel upon
discovering such an old and fearsome object.
Encouraging the visitor to imagine such encounters is one purpose of
the show.
In an illustrated book that accompanies the exhibit, three Haida
representatives (Lucille Bell, Nika Collison and Jolene Edenshaw)
write of how they felt when they first were shown the museum's
antique button blankets.
"There are not too many old button blankets left in our communities,"
they write. "Seeing this blanket in the museum's collection, putting
it on, and smelling the smoke in it was a very emotional moment. It
probably hadn't been worn by a Haida in a hundred years. It is huge.
It must have been a very big man who wore it. The Beaver crest, which
is outlined with dentalium and abalone shell, belongs to the Eagle
Clan."
