George Gustav Heye

Over the last 40 years museums have become important sites to understand the politics and poetics of heritage management, display, and knowledge production. The books under consider- ation here all help demonstrate how museums as relational entities—containing dynamic relations between persons and things, as well as generating them—are emergent processes. Each work helps demonstrate why museums in their many guises remain critical terrains for the negotiation of identity, history, and culture in the push for more collaborative accounts of our world and the circulation and display of things.

Discussion and Review of:

Bodinger de Uriarte, John. 2007. Casino and Museum: Representing Mashantucket Pequot Identity. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Carpenter, Edmund. 2005. Two Essays: Chief & Greed. North Andover: Persimmon Press.

Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, Stephen E. Nash, and Steven R. Holen. 2010. Crossroads of Culture: Anthropology Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Boulder: University of Colorado.

Price, Sally. 2007. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Silverman, Helaine, ed. 2006. Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.

Native American material culture rests uneasily within art museums. Removed from their original contexts of use, these culturally significant objects have been historically resignified as "primitive,” “exotic,” or representative of the mythic Other. Unfortunately exhibited as material evidence 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.
In the spring of 2016, we were invited by the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum to survey their small but distinguished Native American collection. We identified the objects and made exhibition (as well as digital and archival) recommendations. Many of the items were donations from alumni and often did not include detailed provenience. A group of 87 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 Native American artifacts and cultures, and its collections now comprise the core of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C. We contacted Ann McMullen, curator at the NMAI and head of collections research, who provided us with a complete set of documentation for the RISD Museum's Heye Foundation objects. Perhaps most spectacularly, these items included a Tlingit headdress frontlet, whose provenance, impressive craftsmanship, and cultural meanings are the focus of this article.