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Events Commemorate
Native American Heritage Month
 Margaret
Bruchac AC’99, an
Abanaki Indian, professor of anthropology at the University
of Connecticut, Storrs, and Native American Studies Coordinator at the University
of Connecticut, Avery Point, will revisit Smith on Tuesday, Nov. 17, to speak
on “Vanishing Indians: Anthropological Acts of Possession and Dispossession in
the early 20th Century.” The lecture, part of events commemorating Indigenous
Heritage Week and National American Indian Heritage Month, will take place at
7 p.m. in Neilson Browsing Room.
In addition, on Monday,
Nov. 16, a film by Chris Eyre, who is Cheyenne and Arapaho,
titled Edge of America, will be shown at 7 p.m.
in Neilson Browsing Room. The film is based on the story
of an African-American basketball coach on a Native American
reservation.
Bruchac
responded to questions for the Gate about her scholarship
and heritage.
Gate: Why
did you pursue this area of interest?
Margaret Bruchac: In
1998, as an Ada Comstock scholar at Smith, I was engaged
in research for my Smith Scholars project when I signed up
for a "Museum
Anthropology" course with Visiting Professor Patricia Erikson.
She alerted me to Smith College's involvement in excavating
and displaying local Native American remains during the early
20th century. After being recruited to pursue graduate study
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I discovered,
to my surprise, that UMass had more dead than living Native
people on campus. That provoked me to do a great deal of
research into museum collecting, and to spur the formation
of a Five College Repatriation Committee to facilitate the
process of repatriation.
Gate: Have
you always identified strongly with the Native American culture?
MB: I come
from a family of mixed ancestry (as do most modern Native
people). My father was a hunter, trapper, and trader. My
mother's kin were basket-makers and subsistence farmers on
one side, and well-educated lawyers on the other side. I
never identified with the stereotypes of western Plains Indians
or reservations, since they did not reflect my experience
of living in the Adirondacks. I identify most with Native
cultures that are “deeply-rooted,” blending
traditional knowledges and extended kinship networks in relation
to specific local landscapes with select modern ways and
cultural crossings. This survival strategy typifies what
I call "Algonkian
logic," reflecting the ways that Abenaki and other Algonkian
people have always adapted to the changing world around them.
Gate: What
are some of the anthropological acts of possession and dispossession
that you plan to talk about?
MB: During
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American anthropologists
were engaged in a concerted search to collect literature,
ethnographic information, artifacts, and human remains from
what were believed to be "vanishing
Indians." Influential
white male scholars depended heavily upon northeastern Native
American informants during this time, but they rarely credited
Native people as intellectual equals. Scholars used their
collections to develop theoretical models and cultural categories
that promoted Indigenous “authenticity” as a distinctly pre-modern
form of identity. By characterizing Native people as incapable
of adapting to modernity, scholars could, and sometimes did,
speed the political erasure of the very cultures they sought
to rescue from vanishing.
In this talk, I will discuss
three early 20th century case studies that highlight the
social and political dynamics of anthropological collecting
among northeastern Native people. The first case touches
on the collecting of Native skeletal remains from the middle
Connecticut River Valley as part of a larger search for Indian
relics. The second case highlights the correspondence of
Oneida/Abenaki activist Emma Camp Mead, cousin to Seneca
anthropologist Arthur Parker, who served as gatekeeper for
an extended community of Native people that stretched all
the way from the Adirondacks to Hollywood. The third case,
from my most recent research, reveals the suspicious trade
in Haudenosaunee wampum belts that helped Frank Speck and
Edward Sapir finance their research, and enabled museums
to claim possession of sacred cultural patrimony. In each
of these cases, I highlight how alienated Native materials
were possessed and used to ideologically dispossess Native
people of cultural continuity, and how Native people resisted
these vanishing acts. |
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