This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Bill Holm Center at the Burke Museum, a milestone for the globally accessible learning center dedicated to the study of Native arts of the Northwest.
The Center, established in 2003, honors Bill Holm (1925–2020), curator emeritus of Northwest Coast Art at the Burke Museum and professor emeritus of art history at the University of Washington. His work at the Burke established the groundwork for the relationships and ethical practices that still flourish today.
Learn more about the decade-long publishing partnership between the Bill Holm Center and UW Press as well as the upcoming anniversary events below.
Native Art of the Pacific Northwest: A Bill Holm Center Series
The Bill Holm Center book series aims to foster appreciation of the dynamic cultural and artistic expressions of the Indigenous peoples of the greater Pacific Northwest through the publication of important new research on Native art and culture. Guided by editors Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse and Robin K. Wright, the series features a variety of approaches to the history of art and expression along the Northwest Coast.
Books in the series investigate historical productions and contemporary manifestations of cultural expression as well as the important intersections between time, place, technique, and viewpoint. In the Spirit of the Ancestors celebrates the vitality of Pacific Northwest Coast art by showcasing a selection of objects from the Burke Museum’s vast collection. Return to the Land of the Head Hunters, the definitive guide to photographer Edward S. Curtis’s flawed but significant film, offers unique Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw perspectives, accounts of the film’s production and subsequent circulation, and evaluations of its depictions of cultural practice. The fiftieth anniversary edition of Bill Holm’s foundational Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form features reflections from contemporary Northwest Coast artists about the impact of the book, which has been credited with having drawn a number of artists into their own practice.
Series publications also consider cultural knowledge and the embodiment of that knowledge in material productions from multiple and sometimes conflicting cultural perspectives, expanding understanding of the role of art in the complicated history of the region. Megan A. Smetzer’s Painful Beauty, which recently won the Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, contributes to the growing literature addressing women’s artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast. Skidegate House Models, based on Robin K. Wright’s twenty-plus years of collaborative research with the Skidegate Haida community, explores the Skidegate model village carved by Haida artists for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
This free symposium will bring together leading Native American and First Nations artists and scholars to discuss trends and recent research on the distinctive art traditions of the region. Speakers include Sonny Assu (Ligwiłda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations), Shawn Brigman (Spokane), Joe Feddersen (Colville), Dan Friday (Lummi), Kadusné Ursala Hudson (Tlingit), James Johnson (Tlingit), and Tillie Jones (Tulalip), with opening songs from Joe Seymour (Squaxin Island/Acoma Pueblo).
Celebrate twenty years of the Bill Holm Center with an evening reception at the Burke Museum. Speakers include Evelyn Vanderhoop (Haida), Calvin Hunt (Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw), and David Boxley (Tsimshian).
Sponsored by the Labriola National American Indian Data Center at the Arizona State University (ASU) Library, the Labriola Center Book Award seeks to promote contemporary work by Indigenous scholars which benefits Indigenous peoples and nations.
“Professor Reed’s book stood apart because she compellingly writes about California’s violent history while prioritizing Indigenous voices and perspectives. This is only possible because of her fantastic prose and storytelling,” said Jerome Clark (Diné), assistant professor of American Indian Studies at ASU and chair of this year’s award committee. “Scholars and students interested in how extractive violence shapes Indigenous bodies and lands should read Settler Cannabis.”
Combining archival research with testimonies and interviews with tribal members, tribal employees, and settler state employees, Settler Cannabis offers a groundbreaking analysis of the environmental consequences of cannabis cultivation in California that foregrounds Indigenous voices, experiences, and histories.
Kaitlin P. Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) is an associate professor of Native American studies at Humboldt State University.
Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully (1896–1963) is having a moment thanks to the first solo exhibition of her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hailed as “enchanting” by New York Times art critic Holland Cotter, Mary Sully: Native Modern includes twenty-five of Sully’s enigmatic triptychs alongside family photos and other contextual materials.
Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, Mary Sully was largely self-taught. Steeped in the visual traditions of beadwork, quilling, and hide painting, she also engaged with the experiments in time, space, symbolism, and representation characteristic of early twentieth-century modernist art. Her position on the margins of the art world meant that her work was exhibited only a handful of times, including in the exhibition Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Mary Sully, The Indian Church (detail). Author’s collection.
In his book, Becoming Mary Sully, historian Philip J. Deloria recovers his great-aunt’s work from obscurity, exploring her stunning portfolio through the lenses of modernism, industrial design, Dakota women’s aesthetics, mental health, ethnography and anthropology, primitivism, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s.
Read our Q&A with Deloria below to learn more about the reclamation of his great-aunt’s artwork and why “the moment to savor [Mary Sully] . . . has arrived” (New York Times).
Your great-aunt’s drawings were nearly lost. What were the circumstances of their discovery and your initial reaction to them? Were you at all familiar with her artwork before then?
The drawings passed from Mary Sully to her sister Ella and then to their brother, Vine Deloria, Sr., my grandfather. He passed them to my mother in the mid-1970s, and I remember opening the box that held them and being both mystified and captivated by the drawings. I had heard bits and pieces about my great-aunt, including that she had artistic ambitions. No one had really taken those ambitions seriously, however, and it wasn’t quite clear just what it was we were looking at. The works had names attached to them and, while we knew some, many were completely unfamiliar. My mother, more than any of us, recognized them as something potentially important and so worked to keep them safe over the ensuing years.
Can you describe the process of introducing Mary Sully’s art to a wider audience? Were people immediately receptive to her drawings?
After my father passed in 2005, my mother and I began the task of going through his papers, at which point the Mary Sully drawings resurfaced. This time around, though, we went through them with a laptop in hand and were able to make sense of those names that left us mystified back in the 1970s. I did a short talk on the works at one point, and a few art historians suggested I do more with them.
I wanted to emphasize that Sully was a Native person exploring that thing we call “modernism.” She did so from an utterly unique place, not part of any of the classic narratives.
Philip J. Deloria
Being completely naive, I approached some of my curator friends with the idea of an exhibition. They reminded me that museum curators are often (perhaps too often!) approached by people who have found a box of a long-dead relative’s artwork in the basement and think that their museum should mount an exhibition. In effect, they challenged me to make an argument for the importance of the works.
As a historian, Becoming Mary Sully was your first foray into art history. At what point did you decide to write the book? Did you anticipate it being part of a wider initiative of reclaiming your great-aunt’s work?
It was that challenge [from the museum curators] that led me to conceive of the book, which developed first as a series of talks. Presenting the work to an audience always affirmed my sense that the art mattered. It spoke to many people and in many distinct ways. And audiences would raise questions and make observations, which sent me back to the works themselves.
My thinking, in other words, was part of a collective effort, even as I was slowly building an audience for Mary Sully’s art. That work paid off when the curator Jill Ahlberg Yohe included three of Sully’s works in the Minneapolis Institute of Art [MIA] exhibition, Hearts of Our People. Eventually, I was able to convert what was by that time a seriously over-stuffed talk into the more detailed and extended argument found in the book. And it was about that same time that I found myself in conversations with Sylvia Yount of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Johanna Minich of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts [VMFA], and Jill Ahlberg Yohe from MIA about the possibilities of an exhibition. At that point, I knew that things had come full circle.
In the book, you introduce the idea of Mary Sully being “native to modernism.” Can you elaborate on this idea?
I wanted this phrase to convey a double meaning. On the one hand, I wanted to emphasize that Sully was a Native person exploring that thing we call “modernism.” She did so from an utterly unique place, not part of any of the classic narratives. She wasn’t a bohemian, did not self-consciously resist academic painting traditions, and was not part of a performative avant-garde. She was a Native ethnographer of the modern world. On the other hand, I wanted to reject any categorical boundary that would separate out Indigenous people from “the modern world.” Indeed, Native people often recognized “modernism” as part of a crisis of Euro-American epistemology, even as they took the supposed changes of modernity in stride. In that sense, Mary Sully was literally native to—she belonged within—modernity and modernism.
Mary Sully, The Indian Church (detail). Author’s collection.
How did the first survey at the Met come about?
I started discussions with the Met, the VMFA, and MIA in early 2021 about the possibility of museum acquisitions and a shared traveling exhibit. Later that year, I was able to gather with curators Sylvia Yount, Patricia Norby, Johanna Minich, and Jill Yohe, and we had a fabulous day going through Mary Sully’s works together. Plans evolved over time, and the Met was able to schedule what became a single-artist, new acquisitions exhibition for July 2024.
What’s next for Mary Sully’s oeuvre?
Ten of the works in the Met show, owned by the Mary Sully Foundation, will be traveling next to the Minneapolis Institute of Art for a quite different exhibition opening in March 2025. Minneapolis is the largest museum proximate to the Dakota landscapes where Mary Sully spent much of her life, and so it will be appropriate and compelling to place her art in the context of a world of Dakota women’s aesthetic production. I’ve been in dialogue with several curators about including Sully’s work in other exhibitions. One of the major goals of the foundation that we’ve created around Mary Sully’s oeuvre is to advance her work in the American art canon, and I’m looking forward to continuing that work in the years to come.
Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent) is professor of history at Harvard University and the author of Indians in Unexpected Places, Playing Indian, and American Studies: A User’s Guide, coauthored with Alexander I. Olson. He is a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where he chairs the Repatriation Committee; a former president of the American Studies Association; and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
One September afternoon in 2016, I sat on a bench in front of the National Archives in Washington after a long day of research. As I scrolled through social media to pass the time before my ride arrived, a news release shared by a colleague caught my attention. In just two days, the National Museum of the American Indian would unveil, for the first time, one of the treaties the California Indian Nations had negotiated with the United States.
“The Treaty of Temecula is one of 18 treaties negotiated between the United States and American Indian Nations in California and submitted to the United States Senate on June 1, 1852, by President Millard Fillmore,” the announcement read. “Unbeknownst to the American Indian signatories, the U.S. Senate rejected the treaties and ordered them to be held in secrecy for over fifty years,” leaving the tribes “homeless without any local, state or federal legal recourse” and leading “to an ethnic cleansing in which the American Indian population in California plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000 between 1846 and 1870.”
My heart skipped a beat. The museum planned to unveil the treaty that a captain of my tribe, San Diego County’s San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians, had signed more than a century and a half ago to no avail.
The Treaty of Temecula, negotiated within Pechanga territory, served as a physical reminder that the California Indian experience is just as valid as any Native American experience.
Olivia M. Chilcote
The news release went on to say that tribal representatives from four nations affected by the treaty would be present. I called my mom and asked whether she had heard about it through any tribal council communications. She confirmed that no one from my tribe was aware of the unveiling, even though our captain, Pedro Ka-wa-wish, was among the signatories. My mom cried on the other end of the line.
“Olivia,” she said, “you have to be there . . . You need to represent San Luis Rey because no one else will.”
After unsuccessful attempts to communicate with museum officials, I arrived on the morning of the unveiling as an uninvited guest. I walked around the deserted sidewalks in front of the building for a few minutes until I saw some people enter through the glass doors. I followed.
An employee who took me for a tourist informed me that the museum was not yet open.
Olivia M. Chilcote (Luiseño, San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians) is assistant professor of American Indian studies at San Diego State University.
“I’m here for the treaty event,” I said confidently. She took out a list of invitees and asked for my affiliation, but she could not locate my tribe on the list. After I told her the San Luis Rey Band’s captain had signed the Treaty of Temecula, she decided to let me wait there as members of the invited tribal delegations viewed the treaty in private before its installation.
Once it was installed, I joined the invitees in the dimly lit exhibit space. We gathered around the treaty, which looked small compared with the glass case in which it rested, illuminated from above by a single light. The museum director delivered opening remarks before offering the floor to representatives of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and the Ramona Band of Cahuilla.
The tribal leaders spoke powerfully about how the failure to ratify the treaties had affected California tribes. Mark Macarro, chairman of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, recollected fellow Native Americans insisting that “Mission Indians” are not like other Indians because they don’t have treaties with the United States. As he spoke, the Treaty of Temecula, negotiated within Pechanga territory, served as a physical reminder that the California Indian experience is just as valid as any Native American experience.
In Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II, Holly Miowak Guise draws on a wealth of oral histories and interviews with Indigenous elders to explore the multidimensional relationship between Alaska Natives and the US military during the Pacific War. The forced relocation and internment of Unangax̂ in 1942 proved a harbinger of Indigenous loss and suffering in World War II Alaska. Violence against Native women, assimilation and Jim Crow segregation, and discrimination against Native servicemen followed the colonial blueprint. Yet Alaska Native peoples took steps to restore equilibrium to their lives by resisting violence and disrupting attempts at US control.
In the Q&A below, Guise shares more about her process of researching and writing the book as well as how Alaska Native peoples altered the colonial structures imposed upon them by maintaining Indigenous spaces and asserting sovereignty over their homelands.
As part of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conference, taking place in Bodø, Norway from June 6 to 8, we are pleased to offer NAISA members a 30% discount. Find Alaska Native Resilience and other new and notable books through our virtual booth and take advantage of the conference discount with promo code WNAISA24 at checkout through June 30, 2024.
First, can you touch on your background and what led you to this study?
I am enrolled Iñupiaq born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. My family is from the village of Unalakleet. When I was growing up, I heard several stories from my grandparents about 1940s Alaska and assimilationist schools that punished my grandparents for speaking Iñupiat. I remember my grandpa Lowell Anagick talking about his time serving in the guerilla platoon known as the Alaska Territorial Guard with Muktuk Marston. I wanted to link these family histories to better understand the broader experiences of Alaska Natives during the war.
Can you share a bit about your process for conducting and compiling the oral histories of Alaska Native elders and veterans that are included throughout the book?
When I was an undergraduate majoring in Native American Studies at Stanford University, I began interviewing Alaska Native elders about racial segregation in the Alaska territory for my senior honors thesis. When I returned to oral histories as a graduate student at Yale University, I broadened the study. I wanted to better understand what was happening during the passage of the 1945 Alaska Equal Rights Act, which addressed racial segregation in Alaskan towns at businesses and public venues. This era included the Pacific War/World War II, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian Islands, and settler colonial projects that developed alongside imperial US projects.
Over the years, I have worked with several tribal organizations, including the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, the First Alaskans Institute, the Sealaska Heritage Institute, and the Fairbanks Native Association Elder Program, as well as several other senior centers and community-based organizations, including the Alaska Veteran’s Museum, for conducting oral histories. I found tremendous help from Alaskan community leaders, libraries, museums, and through word of mouth in the Alaska Native community. I try to name every person and organization in a timeline of my oral history research travels in the appendix. Some of my favorite interviews are ones that I conducted with elders and their descendants. Oral history is indeed family history and academic.
As colonialism seeks to unravel Indigenous peoples and nations including through land removal, relocation, and boarding school separations, the act of Indigenous peoples restoring equilibrium goes directly against a colonial structure.
Holly Miowak Guise
What are some instances of separation, exclusion, and segregation in Alaska that readers might be surprised to learn?
In listening to elders, including my own grandparents, it seemed unfathomable that Western government, missionaries, and powers tried to assimilate Native children, an incredibly vulnerable population, all while social exclusion existed in Alaskan towns where white residents sought to establish settlements in the post Gold Rush era. How could Native children be forced to abandon their Native languages and assimilate to Westernization when Western society excluded and separated Native people?
Readers might also find it interesting to learn that in certain regions of Alaska, for example in the southeast, WWII–era military ordinances sought to separate Native women from servicemen to prevent interracial dating, sex, and marriage. Unsurprisingly, Tlingit activists mobilized through the Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Alaska Native Sisterhood, writing letters to government officials and military leaders to end stigmatization directed at Native women as venereal. As oral histories show, in some cases Native women defied the ordinances by simply dating and marrying servicemen anyway.
Visiting the former gunnery at Point Davidson with Conrad Ryan Sr. and Karen Thompson, 2017. Karen points to where Metlakatlans fished and gathered herring eggs. Photo by the author.Totem pole honoring veterans in Metlakatla, October 2017. Photo by the author.
You write about what you call “equilibrium restoration.” Can you elaborate on this concept and share an example from the book?
It is probably common for writers to be unable to sleep, or to think deeply in the middle of the night. One such night, I thought about Alice Petrivelli’s story about her uncle banishing the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) doctor, H.O.K. Bauer, who brought physical harm, death by neglecting a patient, and sexual violence to the Atkan wartime relocation camp in southeast Alaska. I thought about the action of her uncle banishing the doctor, essentially expelling federal “aid,” and I realized he was trying to restore equilibrium for their people.
Conceptually, I found “equilibrium restoration” in a variety of settings where Alaska Native people resisted, expelled, and sometimes even appropriated or adopted colonial structures to maintain indigenization. As colonialism seeks to unravel Indigenous peoples and nations including through land removal, relocation, and boarding school separations, the act of Indigenous peoples restoring equilibrium goes directly against a colonial structure. Throughout the book, I try to show different ways that Alaska Natives restored equilibrium, sometimes through tribal mutual aid from Tlingit to relocated Unangax̂ during the war, which counteracted US colonial structures.
For Alice’s uncle, equilibrium restoration could be suddenly achieved in banishing the BIA physician. For others, like elder Nick Alokli from Kodiak, equilibrium restoration took his lifetime. The Western school teachers punished Nick as a child by slapping him with the straps from hip boots for speaking Sugpiaq, and yet, as an elder he returned to Sugpiaq by teaching it to the future generation of youth. He participated in the project of restoring his Indigenous language that colonialism sought to annihilate.
How has this colonial history manifested in Alaska Native communities today?
This is both an easy and hard question to answer. For those impacted by colonialism— through language theft, removal, family separations, sexual violence, and more—these dark histories impact individuals, families, communities, tribal nations, and the intricacies of daily life. These darker colonial histories can be felt, carried, and—I am going to be a bit more hopeful here and say—expelled over one’s lifetime or generations. Native people continue to try to unravel the harm of colonialism while reinstating their Indigenized nations, spaces, and livelihoods.
Gifts from elders in Juneau and Metlakatla, 2014. Signed book from Carol Brady (Tlingit), Southeast Traditional Values magnet from Marilyn Doyle (Tlingit), tea from Rosa Miller (Tlingit), copper earrings from Donald Gregory (Tlingit), kippered salmon from Dorothy Owen (Tlingit/Filipina), and doll fashioned by Roxee Booth (Tsimshian). Photo by the author.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
My main goal for this book is to center the voices, stories, and reflections of Alaska Native elders who witnessed settler colonialism alongside militarization during World War II. Elders shared an array of experiences depending on their tribal geography, gender, and their age at the time of war. I find it profound that so many elders (more than 90 from this study) challenged settler colonialism and discrimination and navigated the war all while clinging to their Indigenous identities and sovereignty. I tried to highlight background information about each elder quoted in the book so readers can better understand Indigenous perspectives. I wish readers will see how much care goes into oral history in building relationships with elders over time and connecting elders through resources by academic institutions as well as tribal and community-based organizations.
Photo by Haiden Renae (Navajo/Diné) directed by Cara Romero (Chemehuevi)
Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq) is assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico. She is the creator of World War II Alaska, a digital humanities project that centers the voices of Alaska Native elders and veterans by bridging institutional, federal and university archives, tribal archives, and oral histories.
Based on over twenty years of collaborative research with the Skidegate Haida community, Skidegate House Models by Robin K. Wright features vital cultural context on the Skidegate model village carved by Haida artists for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. While promoters of the Chicago World’s Fair used the village to celebrate the perceived “progress” of the dominant society, for Skidegate residents it provided a means to preserve their history and culture.
After the exposition, the models went to the Field Museum of Natural History and many were dispersed from there to other collections, but fourteen of the model houses have not yet been located. The book provides extensive archival information and photographs that contextualize the model village and might help locate the missing houses while offering valuable insights into Northwest Coast art history.The following is an excerpt.
From the Foreword by Jisgang, Nika Collison
My name is Jisgang, I belong to the Ḵaay’ahl Laanas clan. Gaahlaay is my chief. My mother is Gid Ḵuuyas, my father was Skilay. I grew up in HlG̱aagilda Llnagaay Skidegate Village. I am one of the last generations to receive the smallpox vaccine. I was five or six when I got it. My mom explained the shot would really hurt, and probably scar a lot, showing me hers. She explained why I needed it. That is how I learned my village should have been much bigger than it was.
In 1862 colonizers purposefully introduced smallpox to the Northwest Coast, killing hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people and almost annihilating some Nations, including the Haida.1 Survivors in northern Haida Gwaii migrated to G̱aw Tlagée Old Massett in order to survive. Chief Skidegate welcomed southern survivors into the village of HlG̱aagilda. Haawa Kilslaay, sah uu dang G̱iida. Before the smallpox epidemic we had successfully kept colonists from our territories. In 1867 the colonial state of Canada was formed, with assigned authority over “Indians and Lands reserved for Indians.”2 In 1876, Canada legislated the Indian Act, which was so effective it informed parts of Apartheid. The year 1876 is also the year missionaries arrived on Haida Gwaii. They shamed and prohibited our ways, often forcing the destruction, sale, or handing-over of our belongings. Desecration of our Ancestors’ graves would soon follow “in the name of science.” Around 1883, Canada and the Church joined forces to create the horrific Indian Residential School System, which operated for more than one hundred years. In 1884, Canada legislated the Potlatch Ban, which criminalized the legal system of the Northwest Coast from 1885 to 1951. Offenders faced seizure of belongings and up to six months in jail. A final mass exodus of our Ancestors’ belongings and funerary remains would follow.
HlG̱aagilda Llnagaay, 1878. Photograph by George M. Dawson. Courtesy of the Canadian Museum of History, neg. no. PA-37756.
In other words, we were thirty years into the genocide of the Northwest Coast when James Deans traveled to Skidegate to commission a model village for the Chicago World’s Fair. [Robin K.] Wright notes that when Deans arrived, there were only about eleven poles and three longhouses still standing in Skidegate (families were largely living in colonial-style homes). Fourteen years prior, almost eighty poles of varying purpose stood in Skidegate. Deans directed artists to use an early photo of Skidegate to create their replicas. The end result was a massive model village that, while commissioned during times of duress, was built on our peoples’ own terms. It was sent to the World’s Fair along with a large collection of our peoples’ belongings, including a real-life pole, house, and canoe. When the fair ended, the village and greater collection were split up and dispersed willy-nilly around the world, far away from Haida Gwaii.
Our Ancestors did everything they could to preserve our Haida-ness. Each subsequent generation has been dedicated to the same. For decades we have been piecing ourselves, our clans, and our villages back together the same way Dr. Wright pieced the Skidegate House models back together.
Jisgang, Nika Collison
About 120 years later, Dr. Robin Wright started to piece the village model back together. For more than twenty years she searched the globe tracking down the model houses and poles; scoured archives to sort out the work of early anthropologists, photographers, missionaries, government agents, and museums; and worked with our people to sort these findings out further, along with working on Haida language, genealogies, privileges, and histories. The findings were woven together into this precious book. In piecing back together as much of our model village as she could, Dr. Robin Wright has not only created a fascinating body of critical research, she has assisted our Nation in our greater plight: piecing ourselves back together.
Model of HlG̱aagilda Llnagaay, Skidegate village, installed in the Anthropology Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 93-1-10/100266.1.39.
Several years ago, I was listening to a radio program on strategies of war and the annihilation of a people. In addition to destroying lives, destroying heritage was a critical tactic. Shatter identity so that the survivors don’t know who they are, where they come from, or their place in the world. I was born in 1971. The population of Skidegate numbered fewer than three hundred people. Growing up, we were called “Indians” and our home, the “Queen Charlotte Islands.” I lived with my grandparents behind the only pole left standing in our village.3 Part of my family lived “off reserve” and part off island, disenfranchised from their community through colonial regimes. Haida was rarely spoken, if at all. The were no masks, dance blankets, songs, or dancing. I didn’t have a proper name. Many didn’t. It was all silenced—hidden away in minds, archives, museums, and behind closed doors.
That was for the first few years of my life. I also grew up during a time of great cultural and political revitalization. Despite massive population loss and colonial regimes, our Ancestors preserved as much Haida knowledge as possible by employing subversive tactics and by working with anthropologists and other foreigners to record our knowledge. We started coming back out through the art, through the poles. I was seven when I witnessed the first pole to be raised in Skidegate Village in almost one hundred years, the Skidegate Dogfish Pole. Carved by my chinaay grandfather Iljuwas Bill Reid, the pole was raised in 1978, in front of the first longhouse to be built in Skidegate since the late 1800s, with a great community potlatch.4 A similar event had happened nine years earlier in the village of Old Massett, when Robert Davidson gifted his community a pole to raise. These events awakened much more than I think either artist anticipated.
My children are Haida, not Indians. They live on an archipelago called Haida Gwaii. The population of Skidegate is nine hundred strong, and more than five thousand as a Nation. My children have proper names, given in potlatch. They have attended many pole raisings in their lifetime, wearing their regalia. They are learning and growing up in the art, the language, the culture, the land and water. They are learning their family ties and their clan and nation histories. They were Haida singing and dancing in the womb.
House Model No. 5, Sgyam Sgwaan Naas, “Sparrow Hawk House,” made by Adam Brown, 1892. Courtesy of the Field Museum, cat. no. 17816. Photograph by Gail Specht.House Model No. “2” really No. 21, Naa Gudgiikyagangs, “People call to each other in it,” 1892, made by Niislant, John Cross, 110 cm × 11 cm × 13 cm. Courtesy of the Field Museum, cat. no. 17802. Photograph by Gail Specht.
Today there are sixteen poles of varying purpose standing throughout Skidegate.5 My clan is readied for a memorial pole-raising in September 2022, and by the end of 2023, four new carved house posts will be standing at Xaaynang.nga Naay, the Skidegate Health Centre. There are nineteen poles in G̱aw Tlagée Old Massett, the most recent being raised in August 2022, marked by a two-day potlatch hosted by Christian and Candace White (Yahgu Jaanas/Laanas clan) in Old Massett. And more recently, in October 2022, a memorial pole was raised for Tlajang nang kingaas, Benjamin Ray Davidson.
We might be a far cry from eighty poles standing in Skidegate alone, but we are also a far cry from one pole left standing. Our Ancestors did everything they could to preserve our Haida-ness. Each subsequent generation has been dedicated to the same. For decades we have been piecing ourselves, our clans, and our villages back together the same way Dr. Wright pieced the Skidegate House models back together.
Like Dr. Wright’s restoring of our model village, the restoration of our world is not fully complete. Not everyone and everything has been located or gathered. There could even be a correction down the road. But we are still here—we are Haida—and we know our place in this world. My friend’s book is an important contribution to this journey. So many years of working with our people to bring critical stories together under one roof. So many names, clans, genealogies, houses, and poles reunited. When I hold this book, I am holding a part of myself, my family, our community, our Nation. When I hold this book, I am holding a part of our past, present, and future, all at the same time.
Haawa to my friend Robin for your respect, passion, and scholarship. Haawa to Haida Gwaii, our home. Haawa to the Ancestors, without your determination we would not be here as Haida. Haawa to our knowledge holders and scholars who scour their minds and the earth to gather the knowledge our Ancestors preserved. Haawa to the Supernatural, who help guide us in this work.
Notes
Not just smallpox but also TB, measles, and other diseases. ↩︎
It was raised ca. 1884 by David Shakespeare for his wife, Jane, of the Saang.ahl Staastas; see Skidegate House Models chapter 3, Model Pole No. 17, for more on that pole. ↩︎
The Shakespeare and Dogfish poles stood side by side for almost a decade before the Shakespeare Pole fell in 1989. The Dogfish Pole was taken down for conservation in 2014. Both now live in the Haida Gwaii Museum. The Longhouse served as the Skidegate Band Council Headquarters through the mid-1990s. In 1998 it became the HlG̱aagilda Xaayda Kil Naay Skidegate Haida Language House, home to the Skidegtae Haida Immersion Program (SHIP). ↩︎
Robin K. Wright is professor emerita of art history at the University of Washington, Seattle, and curator emerita of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Her award-winning books include A Time of Gathering and Northern Haida Master Carvers. Recent books include In the Spirit of the Ancestors (coedited with Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse) and Charles Edenshaw (coedited with Diana Augaitis).
Jisgang Nika Collison belongs to the Ḵaay’ahl Laanas of the Haida Nation. She is Executive Director and Curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum at Ḵay Llnagaay and has worked in the field of Haida language arts and culture for over two decades. Deeply committed to reconciliation, she is a senior repatriation negotiator for her Nation, pursuing reparation and relationships with mainstream museums on a global scale.
Upcoming Events
Author Robin K. Wright will share more about Skidegate House Models and her community-engaged research in conversation with Nika Collison at the following events:
Saturday, May 11, 2024, 7:00 pm PST at the Haida Gwaii Museum in Skidegate, B.C. Details here.
Tuesday, May 14, 2024, 7:00 pm PST at the Burke Museum in Seattle, WA. Register here.
The University of Washington Press joins the Yakama Nation, Northwest Native tribes, and the many individuals, organizations, and institutions grieving the loss of elder Virginia Beavert, who passed away on February 8 at the age of 102.
Beavert, who was also known by her Yakama name, Tuxámshish, was a noted Native scholar and linguist and a tireless advocate for tribal culture and traditions.
“UW Press is honored to have published three books in collaboration with the legendary and deeply knowledgeable Virginia Beavert,” says press director Nicole Mitchell. “Through these works, her learning and wisdom will continue to reach students in Native communities and beyond for many generations to come.”
Ichishkíin Sinwit Yakama / Yakima Sahaptin Dictionary, coauthored with Sharon L. Hargus and copublished with Heritage University, is the first published dictionary of any Sahaptin dialect and documents the Ichishkíin dialect spoken by the Yakama people of Eastern Washington. The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnúwit Átawish Nch’inch’imamí: Reflections on Sahaptin Ways, authored by Beavert and edited by Janne L. Underriner, includes cultural teachings, oral history, and stories (many in bilingual Ishishkíin-English format) about family life, religion, ceremonies, food gathering, and other aspects of traditional culture. Anakú Iwachá: Yakama Legends and Stories, coedited with Michelle M. Jacob and Joana W. Jansen, presents stories that Yakama elders recorded in several dialects of the Ichishkíin language that Beavert collected and translated into English.
Below, longtime UW Press executive editor Lorri Hagman reflects on Virginia Beavert and her work.
When I began working with Virginia in 2013 on The Gift of Knowledge, she was, at the age of 92, already a legend in her own time. In 1986, at 65, when most people would have settled into retirement, she earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Central Washington University. That was followed by a master’s degree in bilingual/bicultural education from the University of Arizona in 2000 (at age 79) and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Oregon in 2012 (at age 90). Virginia was still traveling from her home in Wapato, Washington, to the University of Oregon in Eugene to mentor students and teach the Ichishkíin language, and she had published her 560-page dictionary and the first edition of her collected Yakama legends and stories—monumental contributions to scholarship. Now she was eager to transform her doctoral dissertation into a book for general readers, especially future generations of the Yakama Nation. That book, The Gift of Knowledge, narrates stories from Virginia’s own life that exemplify Yakama lifeways and values.
My quintessential Virginia memory is a story she told when we met in Eugene, Oregon, for what turned out to be a leisurely three-hour breakfast. Horses played a big role in her own life, but this horse story is about how her mother, as a child, was stranded alone overnight and was protected by horses from wolves. It is included in The Gift of Knowledge:
My mother had an experience when she was young where horses saved her life in the mountains. She was taking care of them during a berry picking trip to the Trout Lake area. An Elder told her to take the horses to a certain meadow to graze. She was to leave them and walk back to camp. It was already past noontime and she did not question the request. She rode her own horse bareback, and towed the horses together with a rope halter, the head of one horse to the tail of the one in front, and navigated them in that way.
It was getting dark when she reached her destination. She hurried back toward camp but it became so dark she could not see the trail and was forced to get down on her hands and knees and feel her way. Soon she heard the timber wolves at a distance; they came nearer and nearer. She said she began to feel sorry for herself and was thinking that her relatives did not love her; that they wanted her to die. As she was feeling her way along the trail she felt something warm and soft. It was the nostril of her horse, Taḵawaakúɬ, who had come back to rescue her. She took hold of his tail and he led her back to the meadow. The wolves were following them all the way.
In the meadow all the horses gathered around her. Her horse lay down, and she slept on his belly to keep warm until morning. The wolves were not able to reach her because the horses surrounded and protected her. In the morning she went back to camp and no one mentioned anything. No one apologized to her or wanted to know how she had made out. She explained that that was the cultural way. They wanted her to find a spiritual power from the mountains. While she was asleep she acquired that power. She was a healer for women.
Virginia grew up in a traditional, Indian-speaking household. Her maternal grandmother was a shaman, as were her father and mother; her great-great-grandmother was an herbal doctor and midwife. As a child, she was surrounded by people who spoke Nez Perce, Umatilla, Klikatat, and Ichishkíin. Until she went to school at age eight, her life was spent learning about the world around her, along with skills such as food gathering and the use of medicinal plants. Her work on Native languages began at age twelve, when she met linguist Melville Jacobs while she was working with his student, anthropologist Margaret Kendell, as liaison and interpreter for the people Kendell interviewed. When Jacobs discovered that Virginia was a fluent speaker of the Klikatat language, he taught her to read and write the orthography he had developed to record Klikatat stories, and she began a lifetime of work on Native languages.
During World War II, Virginia joined the United States Air Force, serving as a wireless radio operator at the B-29 Bomber Base at Clovis, New Mexico. After the war, she bought herself a thoroughbred horse, which she rode in races and rodeos, and she earned a living as a medical secretary. Her stepfather—a multilingual speaker of Ichishkíin and southern Salish dialects who had worked with University of Oregon linguist Bruce Rigsby to record oral histories and legends—convinced her to return to school and study anthropology.
She went on to teach courses on Native American languages and cultures at Central Washington University; Yakima Valley College; Wapato High School; Heritage University in Toppenish, Washington, on the Yakama Reservation, where she was the director of the Sahaptin Language Program; and the Northwest Indian Language Institute and World Language Academy at the University of Oregon.
Virginia was the first woman elected as secretary-treasurer of the Yakama Nation’s General Council and served on the council from 1974–85. She was a 2006 recipient of the Washington Governor’s Heritage Award; 2007 Central Washington University Alumna of the Year; 2008 recipient of the Ken Hale prize of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas; and 2008 recipient of a Distinguished Service Award, University of Oregon.
February 12 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1974 Boldt Decision, a watershed ruling that affirmed the fishing rights and tribal sovereignty of Native nations in Washington State and transformed Indigenous law and resource management across the United States and beyond. In recognition of this significant ruling, the University of Washington Press is honored to announce the publication of Treaty Justice: The Northwest Tribes, the Boldt Decision, and the Recognition of Fishing Rights by eminent legal historian and longtime tribal advocate Charles Wilkinson.
Expert and compelling, Treaty Justice weaves personalities and local detail into the definitive account of one of the twentieth century’s most important civil rights cases. Wilkinson tells the dramatic story of the Boldt Decision against the backdrop of salmon’s central place in the cultures and economies of the Pacific Northwest.
In the mid-twentieth century, when Native people reasserted their fishing rights as delineated in nineteenth-century treaties, state officials worked with non-Indian commercial and sport fishing interests to forcefully—and often violently—oppose Native actions. What became known as the “fish wars” of the 1960s spurred twenty tribes and the US government to file suit in federal court. Moved by the testimony of tribal leaders and other experts, Judge George Boldt pointedly waited until Lincoln’s birthday to hand down a decision recognizing the tribes’ right to half of the state’s fish. The case’s long aftermath led from the Supreme Court’s affirmation of Boldt’s opinion to collaborative management of the harvest of salmon and other marine resources.
For Wilkinson, the Boldt Decision sits alongside Brown v. Board of Education and a select few other court cases in terms of bringing justice to dispossessed peoples and resulting in far-reaching societal changes. He writes, “Like those opinions, the Boldt Decision’s ramifications are many and still felt today . . . [it] vividly displays the brilliance and worth of the American system of justice and the moral and tangible benefits it can achieve at its heights.”
As a young civil rights attorney in 1971, Wilkinson joined the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), where he worked alongside John Echohawk (Pawnee) and the late David Getches to fight for the rights of tribal nations, earning significant victories across the United States. After four years at NARF, he became a law professor, teaching first at the University of Oregon in Eugene and then at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Over the next half-century, he built a legacy as one of the foremost scholars of Indian law.
In a tribute for High Country News, Daniel Cordalis and Kristen Carpenter write that “Charles was more than a brilliant lawyer, dedicated professor and gifted author; he was a true friend to Indian Country. To him, the field of federal Indian law was not just an interesting intellectual or professional pursuit; rather, it was a testament to the perseverance of a people. He saw that Indigenous people achieved the revival of tribal nations through their own vision, determination and action, not because of the federal government or anyone else.”
Charles Wilkinson has done it again. With unmatched familiarity and command, he adds another essential volume to the amazing history of Indigenous activism and legal advocacy that has made the Northwest such a vibrant region for Native rights and power. While much more remains to be done to affirm the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty in American legal institutions, Wilkinson’s insights, vision, and legacy offer both guidance and inspiration.
Ned Blackhawk, author of the National Book Award-Winning The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
Treaty Justice was supported by a generous grant from the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and made possible in part thanks to the support of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe and Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. The book was also supported by the Tulalip Tribes Charitable Fund, which provides the opportunity for a sustainable and healthy community for all. Additional funding was provided by a grant from the Hugh and Jane Ferguson Foundation.
UW Press also thanks Michael Burnap and Irene Tanabe, Vasiliki Dwyer, Ellen Ferguson, Kelby Fletcher and Janet Boguch, Mary Hotchkiss and Mary Whisner, Barbara Johns in memory of David Getches, Sandeep Kaushik and Elizabeth Goodwin, Suzanne Kotz and Stephen Tarnoff, Michael Repass, and Cynthia Sears for their generous gifts in support of the book.
Read an excerpt from Treaty Justice in the Seattle Times Pacific NW Magazine.
Upcoming Events
UW Press is proud to join the Northwest Treaty Tribes, the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission (NWIFC), and the Washington State Historical Society in commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Boldt Decision.
US v WA: 50th Anniversary. February 6 and 7 at the Muckleshoot Events Center in Auburn. The Northwest Treaty Tribes and the NWIFC present two full days of events and programming, including a presentation of Treaty Justice by Charles Wilkinson’s family; a screening of Fish War, a documentary produced by NWIFC and North Forty Productions; and a series of panels reflecting on the impact of the Boldt Decision.
Usual and Accustomed Grounds. Exhibition on view February 10–September 1 at the Washington State History Museumin Tacoma. This exhibition focuses on the story of the Native fishing rights movement in Washington State and marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Boldt Decision. Through artifacts, photos, and footage, learn about how tribal people and nations resisted termination policies and fought for treaty-protected fishing access, cultural survival, and sovereignty—with impacts still felt today.
Boldt at 50: Reflecting on Treaty Justice and Tribal Sovereignty. February 12, 7:30 pm at Town Hall in Seattle. Centered around Wilkinson’s Treaty Justice, a panel will discuss the significance of the Boldt Decision and its enduring impact on the tribal sovereignty movement in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Featuring Jeremiah “Jay” Julius, a fisherman and member of the Lummi Nation; Lynda V. Mapes, author and Seattle Times journalist specializing in the environment and Native American issues; Nancy Shippentower, a Puyallup elder and activist; and Coll Thrush, noted historian and author of Native Seattle. The event is set to open with Native drummers and will also feature remarks from Darrell Hillaire, executive director of Children of the Setting Sun Productions (CSSP), and a film clip from CSSP. Books will be available from Third Place Books.
Symposium: The Boldt Decision at 50. March 30, 10:00 am–5:00 pm at the Washington State History Museumin Tacoma. This daylong symposium will explore the history of the ruling that served as an affirmation of Tribal fishing rights and sovereignty, featuring a lecture from state historian John Hughes; a panel conversation with representatives from the Nisqually Tribe, the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, and the Squaxin Island Tribe; and an opportunity for program participants to connect with panelists and purchase copies of relevant historical scholarship. Guests will also have the rare opportunity to view the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek.
In recognition of Native American Heritage Month, we’ve collected some of the many books that provide testament to the enduring, resilient nature of that history. The books below feature Indigenous authors, contributors, and collaborators, reflecting our longtime commitment to sharing Native American perspectives on their cultures. These essential books will help you discover the rich contributions and history of Indigenous people—from the cultural teachings of Coast Salish elders and stories from the Northwest Coast food sovereignty movement to a celebration of the Cherokee cosmos and parka-making conversations in Southwest Alaska.
“A rich visual feast that honors Pacific Northwest Indigenous life” (Library Journal), Jesintel brings the cultural teachings of nineteen Coast Salish elders to new generations through interviews and photographs. Jesintel—”to learn and grow together”—characterizes the spirit of this richly illustrated book, which illuminates the importance of ethical reciprocal relationships and the interconnectedness of places, land, water, and the spirit within all things.
Drawing from her academic and personal expertise, Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht/Nuu-chah-nulth) explores the politics of food sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples in the Pacific Northwest. Coté shares contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth practices of traditional food revitalization and offers evocative stories of her Tseshaht community’s and her own work to revitalize relationships to haʔum (traditional food) as a way to nurture health and wellness. As Indigenous peoples continue to face food insecurity due to ongoing inequality, environmental degradation, and the Westernization of traditional diets, Coté foregrounds healing and cultural sustenance via everyday enactments of food sovereignty.
Foregrounding Indigenous voices, experiences, and histories, Settler Cannabis offers a groundbreaking analysis of the environmental consequences of cannabis cultivation in California. Kaitlin Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) demonstrates how the “green rush” is only the most recent example of settler colonial resource extraction and wealth accumulation. Situating the cannabis industry within this broader legacy, the author traces patterns of resource rushing—first gold, then timber, then fish, and now cannabis—to reveal the ongoing impacts on Indigenous cultures, lands, waters, and bodies.
Ayetli gadogv—to “stand in the middle”—is at the heart of a Cherokee perspective of the natural world. From this stance, Cherokee Earth Dwellers offers a rich understanding of nature grounded in Cherokee creature names, oral traditional stories, and reflections of knowledge holders. During his lifetime, elder Hastings Shade created booklets with over six hundred Cherokee names for animals and plants. With this foundational collection at its center, and weaving together a chorus of voices, this book emerges from a deep and continuing collaboration between Christopher B. Teuton (Cherokee Nation), Hastings Shade, Larry Shade, and other Cherokee speakers, educators, and cultural traditionalists. From clouds to birds, oceans to quarks, the expansive Cherokee view of nature reveals a living, communicative world and humanity’s role within it.
Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, editors Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz) and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. The result is “a veritable feast of First Nations and Native American writers that readers may otherwise never have discovered” (World Literature Today). These ambitious, creative, and visionary works demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories and continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.
This deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women’s coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe uses a framework of Native feminisms to locate this revival within a broad context of decolonization. Rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy, a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, brings us the voices of people transformed by cultural revitalization and considers how this renaissance of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.
For this first dedicated study of Tlingit beadwork, Megan A. Smetzer worked with museum collection materials, photographs, archives, and interviews with artists and elders to reframe this often overlooked artform as a site of historical negotiations and contemporary inspirations. At a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity and gave Tlingit women the freedom to innovate aesthetically, assert their clan crests and identities, support tribal sovereignty, and pass on cultural knowledge. This thoughtful and accessible book demonstrates Tlingit women’s resilience, strength, and power and contributes to the expanding literature addressing women’s artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast.
Based on the exhibition of the same name, this richly illustrated catalog features the work of six artists from Indigenous Nations: Joe Feddersen (Arrow Lakes/Okanagan), Erica Lord (Athabascan/Iñupiat), Geo Neptune (Passamaquoddy), sisters Lily Hope and Ursala Hudson (Tlingit), and Maggie Thompson (Fond du Luc Ojibwe). Their craft speaks to the responsibility of ushering forward cultural traditions while shaping the future with innovative works of art. Through these works, the artists share the honors and burdens that they carry. The exhibition is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Musuem’s Renwick Gallery through March 31, 2024.
Weaving together strands of memoir, contemplation, and fiction, Ernestine Hayes (Tlingit) articulates an Indigenous worldview in which all things are connected, in which intergenerational trauma creates many hardships but transformation is still possible. Using the story of Raven and the Box of Daylight (and relating it to Sun Tzu’s equally timeless Art of War), Hayes expresses an ongoing frustration and anger at the obstacles and prejudices still facing Alaska Natives in their own land, while also recounting her own story of attending and completing college in her fifties and becoming a professor and a writer. Now a grandmother and thinking very much of the generations who will come after her, Hayes speaks for herself but also has powerful things to say about the resilience and complications of her Native community.
Parkas are part of a living tradition in southwest Alaska. Based on nearly two decades of conversations with Yup’ik sewing groups and visits to the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History, this volume documents the social importance of parkas, the intricacies of their construction, and their exceptional beauty. Featuring over 170 historical photographs and contemporary images, full bilingual versions of six parka stories, and a glossary in Yup’ik and English, this book is a celebration of the vitality of these culturally important garments.
The faking of Native American art objects has proliferated as their commercial value has increased, but even a century ago experts were warning that the faking of objects ranging from catlinite pipes to Chumash sculpture was rampant. Through a series of historical and contemporary case studies, Janet Catherine Berlo engages with troubling and sometimes confusing categories of inauthenticity in Not Native American Art: Fakes, Replicas, and Invented Traditions.
Based on decades of research as well as interviews with curators, collectors, restorers, replica makers, reenactors, and Native artists and cultural specialists, Not Native American Art examines the historical and social contexts within which people make replicas and fakes or even invent new objects that then become “traditional.” Berlo follows the unexpected trajectories of such objects, including Northwest Coast carvings, “Navajo” rugs made in Mexico, Zuni mask replicas, Lakota-style quillwork, and Mimbres bowl forgeries.
In the foreword to the book, Joe Horse Capture (A’aniiih), Vice President of Native Collections and Ahmanson Curator of Native American History and Culture at the Autry Museum of the American West, calls Not Native American Art “a must-have for those interested in the complexity of the creation of Native art by both Native and non-Native artists.”
Berlo shares more about the book in the Q&A below.
First, can you touch on your background and share some of your first encounters with fakes, replicas, and forgeries of Native art?
While my PhD is in pre-Columbian art and archaeology of Mesoamerica, I fell in love with Native North American art soon after I started teaching in 1979. When I first encountered nineteenth-century Plains ledger drawings, which were just beginning to be talked about then, I knew immediately I had to learn more about these. Pretty soon, Latin America was in my rearview mirror, and I was fully engaged in studying and writing about Indigenous arts of North America.
In the 1980s scholars of pre-Columbian art were seeing a lot of fakes on the market, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that we fully began to recognize that the field of North American Native art was full of them too. One drawing book, alleged to be “rare Hidatsa drawings,” was offered for sale at a major auction house in 1997, even after I—and other experts—warned them that these were not authentic nineteenth-century drawings. This was a real eye-opener for me. The aims of the art market and the aims of scholars and Native people are very often at odds. The market often cares less about authenticity than about profit.
For several decades now, Northwest Coast carvers have been trying to educate the general public about the value of their work, and that to carve particular clan images is a privilege and a right. It is not available to just anyone, whether they are making a one-of-a-kind object or putting a crest on a manufactured T-shirt.
Janet Catherine Berlo
How did your research for this book take shape?
Because of my experience with the “rare Hidatsa drawings,” which I am sure were drawn by a twentieth-century Mexican collector and artist purely as an entertainment, not as a forgery, I decided to organize a panel on fakes and forgeries, called “Not Native American Art,” (which came to be the title of my book) at a meeting of the College Art Association in 2008. After the panel, I asked the then editorial director of the University of Washington Press if she would be interested in a volume of edited essays on the topic, to which she replied, “No. I would be interested in a book written by you on the topic.” That put the idea in my head, and I kept throwing interesting information in a file for future use. By 2012 this became one of my main research projects, though it took me a long time to finish the book. Everywhere I looked, there were more objects and issues to write about. My colleagues have been teasing me for years that surely there will be volumes one through four of this book!
You note in the introduction that the book isn’t a polemic against non-Native makers of Native-style art. Rather, as a historian, you’re seeking to understand the social contexts within which these objects are made. Can you share examples from the book that touch on the motives of non-Native makers?
I write about a married couple in southern Arizona who used to make exact replicas of ancient Mimbres pottery, using the same clay and firing methods of ancient potters. They were motivated by love of the materials and by trying to solve certain technical problems of how such vessels were formed, painted, and fired. They sold their work as replicas, but they also created a body of very specific knowledge about the technical aspects of this work to be kept in a museum in southern Arizona.
I also write about a European man who married into a Lakota family and became intensely interested in the quillwork and beadwork made by elderly women he came to know quite well. In neither case were these makers trying to fool anyone or present their work as Native-made. But they were deeply interested in the materials, the meaning, and the artistry of such works.
Replica of Mimbres bowl re-assembled by author from potsherds provided by Paul and Lauren Thornburg, 2011. “Over the decade that this book was in progress, this bowl became a metonym for the entire project and the many layers of artifice, talent, research, and yearning that underpin so much of what is ‘not Native American art,'” writes Berlo.
What are some questions and considerations unique to Native art that arise from replication?
More than in most areas of the world, many Native North American cultures have strict customs—or even rules—about who may make certain images. “Copyright,” so to speak, may be held by an individual, a family, or a clan. There are protocols to follow if others seek to use particular images. Some images are sacred and are not for use by outsiders at all.
How has tourism impacted the global appropriation of Native art?
Tourism, globalization, and the internet have had a huge impact on everything that is made in one culture for sale in another, be it West African masks, Indonesian textiles, or Native North American beadwork. Copies abound, and these range from machine-made replicas to hand-carved or hand-woven versions made half a world away.
Just last month I was shopping for a Middle Eastern carpet, and as I was looking through the stacks, the shop owner said to me, “This one is a copy of a Navajo design. It is made in Nepal by Tibetan weavers.” In fact, it did not look very Navajo at all! I didn’t tell him that I have a passage in my book about that very thing, but I did say, “Designs go all around the world, don’t they? You may know that at the end of the nineteenth century, some Navajo weavers were making their own versions of Middle Eastern carpets, because traders thought those designs would sell well in urban areas of the eastern United States.”
So these issues are not new. I was surprised to find in my research how often an expert in 1910, for example, would say about catlinite pipes or ancient pottery: “Of course there are so many fakes now; it is hard to know what is authentic.”
With an increase in cultural awareness around questions of authenticity, as well as the rise in value of Native objects in the arts marketplace, you say in your book that there is more urgency today around issues of forgery or misattribution. What do you hope readers take away from your book?
First of all, I hope that the very different examples that I discuss in-depth will show readers that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to these issues. A Northwest Coast mask made by a carver in Indonesia in 2010 who has been given one book to copy from and told that the middleman will buy as many as he can carve is quite different from a mask made by an expert non-Native carver in Washington State who has worked side-by-side with Native carvers for decades. These two situations should be understood as different phenomena. For several decades now, Northwest Coast carvers have been trying to educate the general public about the value of their work, and that to carve particular clan images is a privilege and a right. It is not available to just anyone, whether they are making a one-of-a-kind object or putting a crest on a manufactured T-shirt.
The role of historians and art historians is to look at actions and objects made and used in very particular ways at different moments in time. And it is important for us to understand the diverse meanings that accrue to actions and objects in varied times and places.
Janet Catherine Berlo is professor emerita of art history and visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. She is editor of The Early Years of Native American Art History and coauthor of Native North American Art, along with many exhibition catalogues over the last four decades.
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