[There are few
practices more AmericanStudies, but also more complex, than that of collecting historical,
cultural, and artistic treasures and memorabilia. This week I’ll highlight and
analyze five such collections and the collectors who assembled them. Please
share collections and museums of interest to you for a collected weekend post!]
On what the artist
and collector got right, what he got wrong, and what we owe him in any case.
19th
century white reformers and activists for Native American rights often called
themselves “Friends
of the Indian,” and while the phrase comes across as naïve and perhaps even
paternalistic, I think it also has a genuine and significant meaning. This was
an era, after all, when even many sympathetic perspectives on Native Americans
portrayed them as
a disappearing community; but to my mind friends exist in the present and
future, and so the phrase represented at least partly a pushback against that common
narrative. One of the most prominent such friends was George Catlin, the
painter and author who produced hundreds
of paintings and multiple books
and volumes of
engravings depicting Native American life and communities; Gatlin
subsequently collected both his own works and numerous artifacts into a traveling Indian
Gallery that he took (accompanied by his own lectures about Native
Americans) around the country and across the Atlantic.
While Catlin
didn’t work for social or political reforms like many
of the century’s activists, that doesn’t mean that his art and collecting
didn’t have their own effect and value. But it’s the artifacts that he included—and
that apparently often drew the
most attention and response—in his collections and Indian Gallery that
represent a significant problem. It’s often impossible to be sure, but it seems
clear that many such Native
American artifacts were stolen or otherwise taken illegitimately from the
individuals and tribes in question, a practice
that unfortunately continues to this day. The fact that Catlin assembled
his Gallery in
order to “rescue from oblivion” the tribes and cultures does not excuse
such actions (for which, to be clear, I don’t have definite evidence in Catlin’s
case, just strong suspicions and educated guesses), but rather makes them that
much more ironic and frustrating, particularly given the basic but crucial fact
that the cultures were not vanishing.
They weren’t
vanishing, but they also often were not documented. Given that most—although
not all by any means—19th Native American cultures continued to
practice oral forms of storytelling, historiography, and collective memory, it’s
fair to say that it would be far more difficult for contemporary Americans to
learn and understand about these cultures as they then existed without the
kinds of documentation produced by Catlin and his peers (like Lewis
Henry Morgan). We can and should look critically at all such figures and
their engagements with and relationships to (and even, perhaps, exploitations
of) 19th century Native cultures, but we also must acknowledge the
resources and opportunities that their works provide us, resources without
which our own ability to study and engage with those cultures in the 21st
century would be significantly diminished.
Next collector
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Collections you'd highlight?
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