1. SUE isn’t a replica. The head is because the actual cranium was crushed and would be too heavy to mount safely even if it wasn’t, but the entire cranium is on display in a separate case. Everything else (minus a few bones that are missing) is absolutely real. At least the one at the Field Museum is. There’s a couple of casts, many of which travel (and one of which lives full-time at Disney World), but the one at FMNH is virtually completely real. Just wanted to point that out because that fossil is actively studied while being on full-time display. There’s ways to do that, and frankly having SUE articulated is actually a lot more useful to scientists than having the specimen in storage.
2. SO THIS IS COMPLICATED OK BUT:
tl;dr: museum guests need to be able to walk away from Native American exhibits knowing a.) that these people and cultures are still alive and b.) a story that encompasses historical truth, spiritual and cultural truth, and scientific truth. These needs are best met by displays blending modern pieces with historical pieces and exhibits co-curated with representatives of actual Native American groups.
As always, this is North American focused, using the US legal framework behind repatriation. Also this is SUPER long but I swear I will get to a point about recreations and why they work better than replicas. Eventually. Please don’t feel the need to leave comments like “you expected me to read an essay?” because this response is not for you. I care. A lot. About this stuff. I care about museums. I care about them moving forward. I care about Native American narratives and letting marginalized people tell their stories in the way they want, and I care a lot about thinking about how to make majority culture sit up and pay attention to what people have to say about themselves.
Let us start by saying that: The communication around repatriation is a two-way street. A lot of people on tumblr got really fucking mad at me the last time I tried to talk about nuance when it comes to repatriation, but I have worked repatriation cases and not all Native American groups want all of their stuff back. (Like the nearly 1,000 Athabaskan baskets in the Field’s basement. We’ve asked. They don’t want those back. Or the thousands of Ancestral Puebloan black-on-white pots and potsherds. The modern Pueblo are a-ok with those being somewhere else. I’m not saying that all groups are like this, those are just two of the cases I personally worked where the people I spoke to really didn’t want their stuff back.) Sometimes a basket is just a basket. Sometimes a dress is just a dress. Sometimes these things being on display are more important to the native groups, because they help tell their story and are a shareable piece of one group’s cultural heritage. Native Americans are not a monolithic culture with a monolithic spiritual system and a monolithic understanding of the past. What one group might want might be completely anathema to another. Even groups that DO want things returned typically don’t want everything. It’s not just about things. It’s not just about tangible material. It’s... almost like the material itself is sometimes immaterial because the importance generally isn’t in the physical value of the material. A group might not really care about the jewelry we have on display but they might REALLY WANT their ritual effigies back, even though the jewelry is much more financially valuable. A lot of people think that repatriation is about greed on the part of the Native American groups, about wealth, but... it’s not. It’s really, really not. It’s about preserving elements of a culture that can’t be preserved in a museum. It’s about freely practicing your culture’s spiritual beliefs, about being reunited with family. Repatriation, when done correctly, is a homecoming. It is the acknowledgment of sovereignty and of a living culture.
So what’s the next step, after giving these important objects back? How does the museum maintain their educational mission when the original object needs to go home? You can tell people the story without the object... but you still have to be effective as an educational display! There’s a lot of things to consider, especially if the was object on display. What story was it telling? How did the museum get the object? If it was bought or given, who sold/gave it, and what was their authority to do so? All of these considerations boil down to one of three-ish options:
1. Take it off display and do nothing.
1a. Take it off display and use the space to explain why it was returned, but put no new object in the space. The hole in the collection is now an educational opportunity to talk about NAGPRA.
2. Replace with a replica.
3. Replace with a recreation.
There’s a few schools of thought on this. I’ve worked in museums in various capacities since 2011, and have a pretty good idea of the future of how Native American artifacts are going to be effective in museums. It’s a conversation that is happening and needs to continue to happen, and the most dominant voices should be the cultures that created those objects. Who can tell their stories better than them? Frankly, we owe it to them to lead the way in this conversation on what should be displayed. We owe them the platform and the financial support and the audience that big natural history museums have to talk about their history in the way they want- and we owe it to ourselves. Permanent anthropology exhibits in natural history museums are due for a reckoning. They are often extremely othering and, (to some extent, paleoanthropology aside), are often caught up in outdated narratives pushing an outdated agenda. It’s impossible to have a morally neutral anthropology exhibit- there’s always going to be an agenda because humans are complicated. With the taxidermied animals, you can say things like “This is an antelope. Here’s what antelopes do.” An antelope on its own has no moral value, no history of cultural oppression. It’s just an antelope. You can’t say that about a cultural group - our perceptions of how people act are always going to be biased. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you- all humans have a bias. It’s inescapable. All cultures perceive other cultures in certain ways, and what’s important is that we recognize how that perception changes over time. We look at the racism of the past, we acknowledge it, but we also provide a space for the future. We don’t say “it’s over and done, let’s forget it,” but we do have to move on and improve ourselves. The only way that’s getting done is if the institution changes how it represents itself and the people it’s talking about. (If you want to see an example of this, check out how the Field recontextualized its old “Races of Mankind” sculptures. The exhibit is now called Looking at Ourselves and it really gets into the history of scientific racism, and how old ideas of how Americans thought about race and racial differences were spread and changed over time. Google Arts and Culture has some of the images here: https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/rethinking-the-sculptures-of-malvina-hoffman-the-field-museum/bQIy0COTLheZKA?hl=en
They also... god, I’m really telling on myself here, but they’re also boring. Guests don’t like them! Walking through a hall of display cases with limited information, faded colors, and dim lights sucks. NOBODY enjoys this. It’s not 1930 anymore. If I want to know what a jingle dress looks like, I can google it. Museums need to offer a hell of a lot more than just imagery. They need context. They need to provide information that wikipedia cannot. They need to provide a tangible experience, and you can’t get that from just looking at display cases of clothes and tools. Guests want a narrative. These old halls simply don’t provide that. If museums want to maintain their educational value, they need to create a space for storytelling, for engagement. People want authenticity, let’s give that to them.
Anyways, I’m rambling. Back to the importance of recreations, rather than replicas, in museum anthropology.
So. Recreations, not replicas, are becoming more and more important to the process of repatriation and decolonizing museums. I’ve talked about this before, but if you actually talk to Native American groups, generally speaking they want people to know about their culture- both their history and their present. One of the most frustrating things about my research assistantship at the Field, when I did a bunch of visitor exit surveys, was realizing that despite seeing modern objects and despite walking through a gallery of Native American art commissioned by the museum from and curated by a modern Pawnee artist (Bunky Echo-Hawk) and seeing videos of interviews with this guy, seeing a picture of him, given plenty of evidence that he is very much alive, active, and Native American... given all that evidence, some visitors came away thinking that Native Americans were extinct. “I didn’t know there were any left,” “I’m surprised that there are Native Americans in Chicago,” it was... bad.
And it wasn’t just white people, either! All kinds of people genuinely thought that despite seeing a painting of Yoda wearing a war bonnet (probs Echo-Hawk’s most famous painting, he does a lot of pop culture combined with Native American iconography), that Native Americans were a thing of the past. This is a HUGE PROBLEM, because when we treat a whole bunch of living people like they’re actually dead, it pushes them into this realm of... disbelief, I think is the word? Fictive thinking? Majority culture doesn’t feel a need to care about what is happening to Native Americans because our dominant educational and entertainment platforms talk about them as a thing of the past. But it was a step, bringing in modern Native American art. Baby step. But a step.
So a couple years later, they tried again. This time they worked with Rhonda Holy Bear. I wasn’t around for the exit surveys, but they tried emphasizing her presence more (with pictures of her standing with the stuff she made and the stuff she pulled from museum collections to put on display), and it was really well-received. Then, while that was going on, the museum invited Chris Pappan to hang up ledger art all around the old Native American hall, and the response to that was incredible. Basically, he recontextualized these old displays that create a distorted image of Native cultures and it was fantastic and it actually made people go “wait a minute... this stuff is NEW.” It made people sit up and pay attention, and it was finally tangible evidence for our collections team that there was a way to make museum guests engage with contemporary Native issues.
So that leads us to the past couple of years, and even the best, most ethical museums are facing a problem and grappling with it in different ways. How the hell do we get people to understand that Native American cultures are real, vibrant, vivid, and most importantly living? Yes, the US government committed genocide against them... but they aren’t all dead! Native Americans are still here. What’s the point of painting a picture of the past when that picture obscures the present? This puts a lot of us in a really tenuous position because museum displays are traditionally pretty static.
So we could do the replica route, but... that kinda keeps us rooted in the past. FURTHERMORE, not all replicas are ethical! There are some groups who consider casts of their ancestors offensive, because of what the casting process represents to them- the desecration of their ancestors’ bodies in the name of science. This is not true of all Native American cultures- there’s many, many different beliefs about what is acceptable to do with a body. The same is true of sacred objects. If you make a replica, an exact replica of the thing you don’t want on display... does it still hold the power? Is it still important that some people be disallowed to see it? Is it still exposing the sacred ritual to people who have no business being involved with it? Again: not all groups will answer the same way. Additionally, replicas don’t always play well with visitors. At least when they bother to read the signs. They want authenticity, or some version of it. Even if the replicas are made by the originating culture, “replica” plays poorly with guests in the anthropology halls. You have to strike a balance between what guests will actually look at and learn from and what’s the best thing to display. Recreations, however, are different. A recreation is the object reinterpreted. Given a spin, whether it’s just personal or a whole modern twist. Guests respond super well to recreations because when they see history+artistry, it gives them a better understanding of the culture. When you see a modern artist making something, it cements that connection in your mind.
So, from the three Native American designed and curated exhibits, here’s what we learned between 2013 and 2016:
-Guests are able to perceive cultural continuity between past Native Americans and modern Native Americans if the modern pieces are contextualized with historical pieces.
-Native American exhibits curated by Native Americans are really, really well-received by museum guests when compared to a traditional exhibit originally mounted in the 1930s and then updated slightly in the 1950s, a slightly more focused one from the 1980s that was updated in the mid 1990s and then again in the early 2000s for NAGPRA stuff, and an arguably pretty good one from the mid 2000s. The update to the OG exhibit, where Chris Pappan put ledger art up on the old display cases, was particularly popular. (So much so that it finally got enough public interest for the corporate wing to say “ok you can finally have the money and staff to redo this hall,” which is currently a process being undertaken with significant direction from Native Americans from various nations and organizations.)
So there’s... kind of an obvious solution to that problem of “how do we get people to understand and care.” We have to juxtapose the modern with the historical, and it has to be led by the descent community of the people who made the historical. It’s not that hard, as it turns out, to do this. All you need is money from the endowment (tbh this is the hardest thing to get, if you can get a white/rich/male board of directors to care about this kind of thing, the rest follows pretty easily in comparison), a willingness to open up the collections and space, and the pursuit of active partnerships with Native Americans. The Field was able to put on three exhibits in the span of three years, and in 2019 they launched a fourth. Apsáalooke Women and Warriors, it’s called, and it’s phenomenal.
"Instead of presenting objects chronologically or rigidly divided by materials or technique, the exhibition counterposes and blends contemporary and antique pieces, showing images of creative women past and present together with objects and representations of the Apsáalooke warrior past. The result is to show the museum visitor the Apsáalooke as people not locked into the past, but continually inspired by and growing from it. Nina Sanders writes: “Our ultimate goal is to deliver our own narratives, write our own scholarship, and educate the world about our cultures, worldviews, and experiences.”“
This exhibit’s powerful message comes from the modern and old existing in harmony, side-by-side. With the backing of a big cultural institution like the Field, the Apsáalooke artists and scientists involved in creating this exhibit are able to share their story with the world in a way that wouldn’t be possible without both of those components.
Going forward, having contemporary Native creators and scholars involved in the curation process is going to be vital to how museums talk about Native Americans. The only way forward is actually letting Native Americans tell their modern story alongside the story of the past. It’s a way for these big institutions to give a platform and voice to people that have historically been exploited by these institutions. Recreations are going to be absolutely vital to this going forward. Replicas too, though I think not as much, because the stories of Native Americans aren’t finished.
