Shakee.át Entanglements

Manual Spring 2017 Give and Take 1 Object Lesson Shakee.át Entanglements Robert W. Preucel & Alexandra M. Peck 51 88 Issue— 8 FIG. 1 Native American (Tlingit) Thunderbird and Whale Frontlet (Shakee.át), late 19th century Wood, abalone shell, pigment 19.1 × 14.6 × 5.1 cm. (7 ½ × 5 13/16 × 2 in.) Museum Works of Art Fund 44.154 / Native American objects rest uneasily within art museums. Removed from their original contexts of use, they have been historically resignified as “primitive,” “exotic,” and representative of the mythic Other. Exhibited as material signs of progress, advancement, and civilization, they are largely silent about their makers’ desires and intentions. Today, Native American objects are reclaiming new voice. Many art museums are adopting more inclusive approaches to representational practice and are engaging with Native American peoples and objects in new ways. These approaches are fostering exciting conversations about the intersections of European and Native American ontologies and aesthetics. Manual Spring 2017 Give and Take In the spring of 2016, we were invited by the RISD Museum to survey their small but distinguished Native American collection. We have been identifying the objects and making exhibition (as well as digital and archival) recommendations. Many of the items are donations from alumni and often do not have detailed provenience. A group of eighty-seven objects, however, were acquired in 1944 as part of an exchange with the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. The Heye Foundation was founded in 1916 as a prominent research institution focusing on the American Indian, and its collections now comprise the core of the National Museum of the American Indian (nmai) in Washington, D.C. We contacted Ann McMullen, a curator at the nmai and head of collections research, who provided us with a complete set of documentation for the Heye Foundation objects. George Gustav Heye was a New York banker who became enamored of Native American material culture and formed a vast archaeological and ethnological collection that he housed in his museum at Audubon Terrace in the Bronx [Fig. 2]. When he died in 1956, it is said that he had acquired more than one million objects representing “both the highest artistic expression of Indian cultures and the evidence of everyday life.”1 Heye positioned himself at the center of the Native American collecting network and he purchased many of his Northwest Coast objects from noted collectors, such as George T. Emmons, Thomas Crosby, Leo Frachtenberg, T. T. Waterman, and D. F. Tozier. These collectors specialized in the material culture of specific tribal groups. FIG. 2 For example, Emmons, a U.S. Navy lieutenGeorge and Thea Heye at the Museum of the American Indian. New York City, 1917. ant, collected among the Tlingit people of Photo courtesy of National Museum of the southeast Alaska. American Indian Archives (P11582) A small subset of the nmai objects have been repatriated to the Tlingit tribes and Native Alaskan corporations under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) of 1990.2 One of the most famous of these repatriations was the return of the Bear Hat (known to Tlingit speakers as Xoots Shada Koox’) to the Tlingit Chilkat Indian Village of Klukwan, Alaska.3 This crest hat is considered an “object of cultural patrimony” under the law, and was shown to have been inappropriately removed 2 Object Lesson 53 / 88 Issue— 8 from the village. As Joe Hotch, president of the Chilkat Indian Village, put it, “Receiving the Bear Hat was more than the return of an important cultural object; it was like the return of a family member.”4 The RISD Museum has an outstanding Tlingit headdress that was acquired as part of the Heye Foundation exchange [Fig. 1]. It is a special kind of headdress known as a frontlet, and is used by several different Northwest Coast peoples. It originated among the Tsimshian of British Columbia’s central coast, and was quickly adopted by the neighboring Tlingit and Haida people.5 Unlike Haida frontlets, characterized by a single large figure, and Tsimshian frontlets, which often depict small faces or figures surrounding a large figure, Tlingit frontlets commonly portray a large primary figure and a smaller secondary one.6 Traditionally, high-ranking Tlingit men wore these headdresses along with special ceremonial regalia, such as Chilkat robes and dance collars, at memorial potlatches [Fig. 3]. Today, frontlets are worn at traditional events as well as public dance celebrations, such as the biennial celebration program sponsored by the Sealaska Heritage Institute. The RISD frontlet is a rectangular wooden plaque with primary and secondary figures in the center and abalone shell inlay around the edges. Like most Tlingit frontlets, it is carved out of alderwood and painted blue, red, and black. Several of the inlaid shells have perforations indicating previous lives as part of a necklace or perhaps earrings. The frontlet’s central carving appears to represent a bird with a slightly hooked beak (partially restored) holding an animal being torn in half. The Heye Foundation’s catalogue card, however, provides a rather different description: “Head ornament of wood, carved to represent a man holding the head of a mountain sheep, red, black, blue painted decoration, Tlingit.” Unfortunately, the card does not identify where the item was collected, or from whom it was purchased. So, here we have a contradiction. Our observation suggests that the frontlet depicts a bird splitting an animal in two, while the catalogue card identifies the image as a man holding the head of a mountain sheep. How might we go about resolving this issue? Catalogue cards are valued in the museum world as a primary source of documentation, but they are sometimes incorrect because of errors that can arise in the transferral of information from the original document to the object record. We also know that archives related to turn-of-the-century Native American art are often incomplete as a result of flawed interpretations and cultural misunderstandings. Native informants often held back the meanings of objects from collectors in an effort to retain symbolic control over the objects leaving the community. Manual Spring 2017 Give and Take 3 Object Lesson 55 / 88 Issue— 8 The standard approach might be to approach the problem from a material-science perspective. For example, we can identify the abalone inlay as green abalone (Haliotis fulgens) coming from the western coast of Northern California. This identification draws attention to the distant trade relationships between the Native peoples of Northern California and the Tlingit of southeast Alaska. We suggest that a productive way to enhance this interpretation is to honor the frontlet’s Tlingit origins and grant primacy to cultural context. By incorporating Tlingit concepts into our analysis, we can develop a richer understanding of the frontlet’s meaning and traditional use. The interpretation of Native objects is always a “give and take”—a tacking back and forth between Western and non-Western contexts—to reveal the many layers of meaning. In the Tlingit language, the frontlet is called a shakee.át, translating literally as “a thing on top.” The word shakee means “something with a rounded top, like a mountain,” “above it,” or “elevated over it.”7 The word át refers to a “thing.” The name thus highlights the location of use— on a person’s head—and calls attention to the agency of the object in lending distinction to a high-ranking person. The Tsimshian name for frontlet, amhalait, translates as “for dancing or twirling.”8 Here the name characterizes the object in motion. The root word halait is generally translated as “dance,” “dancing,” or “dancer,” and references someone who has an extraordinary gift or spiritual power, often a medicine man, shaman, or initiate. The Tsimshian name is thus ontologically richer than the Tlingit name, which is more descriptive. This difference supports the idea that the Tlingit people borrowed the headdress style, but not the underlying concept, from the Tsimshian people. Another insight into Tlingit ontology is provided by a category of things classified by the word at.oow, translated as “an owned or purchased thing.”9 These belongings are the inalienable possessions of a particular Tlingit clan, and play a special role in Tlingit society in that they take on the characteristics of living beings. They are typically created, named, used, given away, and retired according to strict protocols. For example, objects become at.oow when they are publically validated at a memorial potlatch by being given a name and having money given out on their behalf. The identification of the frontlet’s central image is critical to interpreting clan ownership. Tlingit clans are FIG. 3 Tlingit silversmith Jim Jacobs traced by matrilineal descent within a dual social division wearing a shakee.át headdress. known as a moiety (either Eagle or Raven). The central Sitka, Alaska, 1931. Photo courtesy of the Alaska carving on Tlingit frontlets usually references a clan crest State Library, Luella Smith or emblem and depicts an important event in the clan’s Photo Collection (ASL-P110-05) Manual Spring 2017 Give and Take mytho-history. Each clan has a primary crest, a moiety crest, and a number of secondary crests that together distinguish it from all other clans. This crest system connects all people who have the rights to the same clan identity and specifies their relatives in other clans. Crest objects can thus be seen as a material genealogy, since they physically materialize the deeds and experiences of ancestors. Crests become clan possessions usually through an otherworldly encounter or the loss of life of a clan member. For example, the Chookaneidi clan claims the glacier as one of its crests because one of its clanswomen died on a glacier. For this reason, the glacier is represented as a central motif on their crest blanket.10 The RISD frontlet is incomplete; it is missing key elements of the headdress. In its finished form, the wooden plaque would be fastened to a cloth-covered cylindrical frame covered by white swan down and attached to a long “cape” or trailer covered with white ermine pelts. Frontlets are typically decorated with whiskers of the Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus) and tail feathers of the red-shafted flicker (Colaptes auratus cafer), standing erect atop the wooden plaque. Each material carries its own special significance. For example, the flicker is believed to serve as a messenger between upper and lower worlds. Similarly, the ermine cape refers to the winter potlatch season when the ermine’s fur turns white. The abalone shell with its brilliant iridescent blue is thought to represent the sky world. We consulted Harold Jacobs, a Tlingit scholar, in an attempt to identify the frontlet’s central carving.11 He immediately recognized it as a “classic example” of the Thunderbird and Killer Whale crest.12 The Thunderbird and Killer Whale story is popular among many Northwest Coast peoples and is represented in multiple forms, such as totem poles [Fig. 4]. The Thunderbird is a large, powerful bird that feasts upon whales during storms. Whenever thunder claps, it signals that the Thunderbird has just swooped down and captured a whale for its dinner.13 The Thunderbird’s nest, positioned on top of a high mountain, is littered with whale bones, the remains of its meals. Few people claim to have seen Thunderbird seize a whale, as the bird usually renders its observers ill or blind.14 Fossil whale remains have been reported from a lake near Clayoquot on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. According to James Swan, an ethnologist working among the Northwest Coast Native FIG. 4 communities in the 1850s, the Quileute and Chimakum Haida Thunderbird and Whale communities of Washington regarded whale fossils as Mortuary Pole Replica, carved by Nathan Jackson. evidence of great feasts of the Thunderbird, who caught Totem Bight State Historical the whales in the ocean, deposited them near the lake, and Park, Ketchikan, Alaska Object Lesson 57 / 88 Issue— 8 4 then devoured them.15 Geologists have speculated that the Thunderbird and Whale story may be an indigenous account of a tsunami triggered by an earthquake at the Cascadia subduction zone separating the North Atlantic and Juan de Fuca plates.16 Significant earthquakes have occurred in this region for thousands of years, thus potentially rooting the story in the far-distant past. Manual Spring 2017 Give and Take 5 An almost identical shakee.át [Fig. 5] is held by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.17 It was collected by Tlingit ethnographer Louis Shotridge in 1924 at Huna, Alaska. Shotridge’s fieldnotes indicate that it was called the “Hunting Thunderbird” and formerly owned by Anlenyet, a member of the Kik.sadi clan of Wrangell, Alaska. The object was gifted to the T'akdeintaan clan of Huna, most likely during a potlatch, in honor of a maternal relationship linking the two clans. Shotridge explains that the carving represents the Thunderbird tearing a whale in two. Because of stylistic similarities between the Penn and RISD objects, Harold Jacobs thinks that the RISD shakee.át may have been made by the same carver. This finding suggests that it too could be from Wrangell. Object Lesson 59 / 88 Issue— 8 Even with this detailed contextual information, it is difficult to appreciate a shakee.át until you see it danced. For the Tlingit people, dance is a central means of expression, communication, and storytelling, as well as a form of entertainment. Frontlets are popularly referred to as “dancing headdresses” because of their role in dancing.18 Traditionally, the cylindrical “inner” part of the headdress was packed with eagle down, although today goose down is often used. When a performer dances vigorously, the down flies out, spreading peace and good wishes amongst the potlatch guests. The shakee.át is also danced as part of the yeik.utee, also called the Blanket Dance, often performed at potlatches [Fig. 6]. In this dance, a blanket is held vertically to create a theatrical stage. One or two dancers stand behind it so that only their headdresses are visible.19 The dancers then move their headdresses back and forth along the top edge of the blanket in time to the music for the entertainment of the audience. The Tlingit shakee.át is a semiotically rich object. The headdress style FIG. 5 Thunderbird and whale frontlet (NA6834) from was borrowed from the Tsimshian peoHuna, Alaska. Courtesy of the Penn Museum, ple, and this usage may have required image #196047 a payment. Its very materials embody FIG. 6 Tlingit elder George Jim dancing the yeik-utee the opposition of the sea and sky dance at a totem-pole raising. Kake, Alaska, 1971. worlds—the ocean is symbolized by the Photo courtesy of Alaska State Library, Kake Potlatch Photo Collection (ASL-P263-109) sea lion whiskers, and the celestial is represented by the abalone, eagle down, and flicker feathers. Some of its materials, such as the abalone, were acquired through trade with neighboring tribal communities. The Thunderbird and Whale carving indexes the instability of ocean and sky during times of seismic stress and may even refer to a historical event. These multiple entanglements give the frontlet its dynamic agency, enabling it to communicate and sacralize a social order that links people together in the clan system and places certain individuals “above” others according to their inherited status. For us, interpretation is a dynamic process of moving back and forth — a giving and taking — as we test out our ideas against Native American concepts 6 Give and Take Spring 2017 and worldviews. This exercise is an inherently collaborative process that necessarily involves reaching out to museum professionals and Native Alaskan colleagues. By integrating ethnographic research, Tlingit oral histories, and scientific analyses, we are able to offer compelling accounts of the meaning and likely provenience of this remarkable shakee.át. More generally, the triangulation of these different ways of knowing allows us to reanimate Native American objects and learn from their makers, past and present. Acknowledgments Manual We would like to thank Amy Pickworth, Ann McMullen, Harold Jacobs, Alessandro Pezzati, and Lucy Williams for their research and editorial assistance. We dedicate this essay to the memory of Teri Rofkar (Chas' Koowu Tla'a), T'akdeintaan clan, Snail House, Huna, Alaska. 1 Clara Sue Kidwell, “Every Last Dishcloth: The Prodigious Collecting of George Gustav Heye,” in Collecting Native America: 1870–1960, ed. Shepard Krech III and Barbara A. Hail (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), 250. 2 The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Public Law 101-601), or NAGPRA, as it is commonly known, allows federally recognized Native American tribes and corporations to request the return of human remains and certain categories of objects, including objects of cultural patrimony, sacred objects, and funerary objects. It has led to productive new relationships between tribes and museums. 3 James Pepper Henry, “Coming Home,” in Native Universe: Voices of Indian America, ed. Gerald McMaster and Clifford E. Trafzer (Washington, DC: National Geographic Books, 2008), 246. 4 Rita Pyrillis, “Repatriation’s Open Door Helps Museums as Well as Native Communities,” National Museum of the American Indian Quarterly Winter 2000: 10. 5 Carol Sheehan McLaren, “Unmasking Frontlet Headdresses: An Iconographic Study of Images in Northern Northwest Coast Ceremonial Headdresses” (master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1977), 15. 6 Bill Holm, “The Dancing Headdress Frontlet: Aesthetic Context on the Northwest Coast,” in The Arts of the North American Indian: Native Traditions in Evolution, ed. Edwin L. Wade (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 1986), 136. 7 Keri Edwards, Dictionary of Tlingit (Juneau, AK: Sealaska Heritage Institute, 2009). 8 See Jay Miller, Tsimshian Culture: A Light Through the Ages (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 104. See also and Marie-Françoise Guedon, “An Introduction to Tsimshian World View and Its Practitioners,” in The Tsimshian: Images of the Past, Views for the Present, ed. Margaret Seguin (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984), 138–39. 9 Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, Haa Tuwunáagu Yís, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), 19–21. 10 Thomas F. Thornton, Being and Place Among the Tlingit (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), 107. 11 Harold Jacobs is the cultural specialist of the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. 12 For other frontlets with Thunderbird and Whale imagery, see the examples illustrated in McLaren’s master’s thesis, “Unmasking Frontlet Headdresses,” 1977. 13 Ruth Ludwin and Gregory J. Smits, “Folklore and Earthquakes: Native American Oral Traditions from Cascadia Compared with Written Traditions from Japan,” in Myth and Geology, ed. W. Bruce Masse and Luigi Piccardi (London: Geological Society of London, 2007), 67–94. 14 Mark A. Hall and Mark Lee Rollins, “Sky Kings of the Past,” in Thunderbirds: America’s Living Legends of Giant Birds (New York: Cosimo, 2008), 57–69. 15 James G. Swan, “The Indians of Cape Flattery, at the Entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington Territory,” Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge 220 (1870): 57–58. 16 Thomas H. Heaton and Parke D. Snavely, Jr, “Possible Tsunami Along the Northwestern Coast of the United States Inferred from Indian Traditions,” Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 75, no. 5 (1985): 1457–59. 17 Robert W. Preucel, "Shotridge in Philadelphia: Representing Native Alaskan Peoples to East Coast Audiences. In Sharing Our Knowledge: The Tlingit and their Coastal Neighbors, ed. Sergei Kan with Steve Hendrickson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 42. 18 Bill Holm, “The Dancing Headdress Frontlet: Aesthetic Context on the Northwest Coast,” in The Arts of the North American Indian: Native Traditions in Evolution, ed. Edwin L. Wade (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 1986), 133. 19 Sergei Kan, Symbolic Immortality (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 227.