By Kate Hill
Staff Writer
Cazenovia College’s annual Washburn Distinguished Lecture Series showcases notable individuals speaking on topics of broad interest.
On March 4, the college welcomed Dr. Scott Manning Stevens to McDonald Lecture Hall to present “Native America and the Problem with Museums.”
The free lecture, delivered to a full auditorium, focused on the issues that face museums when displaying Native American content.
Stevens is an associate professor and director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University.
A citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk nation, Stevens holds a Ph.D. and master’s degree from Harvard University and has taught at a number of universities, including Harvard, Arizona State and SUNY Buffalo.
The researcher specializes in the representation of Native Americans in American culture.
His primary areas of interest include diplomatic and cultural strategies of resistance among North American Indians in the face of European and American settler colonialism, as well as the political and aesthetic issues that surround museums and the indigenous cultures they put on display.
Stevens is the co-author of “Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North” and co-editor of “Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians.”
Stevens began his presentation with a discussion of the key concerns that Native Americans have with museums.
“We have a historic problem with museums, both how they have represented us and interpreted our cultures, [and] also how they have collected our material culture and, in many cases, our ancestor’s bones,” Stevens said.
He highlighted the fact that Native American exhibits are often clumped together in natural history museums with dinosaurs and other things from the distant past.
“You stood in these great halls looking at these dinosaur remains and just around the corner you would have . . . a blank-faced mannequin, as though we really boiled down to a series of different costumes,” Stevens said. “It did very little of explaining about the living cultures represented by these ghostly dummies or the long and arduous political and cultural struggles that our people still face . . . This is a long-standing problem about thinking of a people as collectible and a culture as collectible.”
As a result, Stevens continued, Native Americans become permanently locked in the past.
“Anyone standing here who is speaking English and who drove here in a car is not a ‘real’ Indian,” he said. “It is bad enough that General Sheridan said ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian.’ It is worse . . . if Americans think the only real Indian is a dead Indian . . . As far as [museums] are concerned, our authenticity lies buried somewhere in the past.”
Stevens went on to explore another particularly troublesome aspect of museums — the sheer number of Native American remains housed within the institutions.
He also discussed the 1990 enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which requires institutions that receive federal funding to inventory their collections, consult with federally recognized Native American tribes, and repatriate human remains or cultural items that meet certain criteria.
“When I was a graduate student, Harvard was fighting NAGPRA,” Stevens said. “They thought ‘this is just going to empty our museums . . . In one case, an entire graveyard was taken from Hawaii in the early 20th century. These things had been looked at, set aside, and really abandoned by the museums, but because they belonged to the museum, [they] were not giving them up.”
According to Stevens, a long history of grave robbing and placing human remains on display has created generations of mistrust between Native America and museums.
As a result, there are very few reservations with museums exploring their own histories and cultures.
“Museums in the United States, when it comes to Native America, have a lot of heavy lifting to do and a burden given to them by the American public school system,” Stevens said.
On average, the last year that students in public schools learn about Native America is fourth grade.
“Think of the types of things that you wouldn’t tell a child because of their age,” Stevens said. “ . . . You’d tell them happy stories about Pocahontas, Sacagawea [and other] accommodating Indians — all the ones that seem down with the [settler] thing . . . If you stop at fourth grade, you’re not learning the stories about boarding schools [and forced assimilation], or about the forced sterilization of Native women up through the 1970s, or about the open, genocidal policies of various state and territorial governments. You’re not learning any of that; in fact, you’re done. So where are you going to learn about Native America in any kind of valuable way outside of whatever Hollywood throws at you? As an adult, most likely at a museum.”
Unfortunately, Stevens noted, many museum displays are extremely out of date and problematic.
In an effort to help present a more accurate depiction of Native America, Stevens advocates both working with museums to “get it right” and talking with Native communities about how they want to represent themselves institutionally.
The speaker went on to explain that, using revenue from casinos, some Native groups have begun building cultural centers aimed at both sharing their storied pasts and representing themselves as living, breathing people.
“What I love about [the Ziibiwing Cultural Center in Michigan] is that it follows them through time right up until the present, and it doesn’t white-wash that history,” Stevens said “ . . . It talks about the problems their communities face today with addiction, poverty, chronic unemployment and things like that. They are part of that community’s story. It frames them within an Anishinabe framework, which helps you understand how they see themselves in the world . . . [and] how they make sense of their very long history and the cataclysm of colonialism, displacement, reservations and boarding schools.”
Stevens concluded his presentation by stating that he is hopeful that despite their dark pasts, museums have the potential and the responsibility to evolve to accurately and effectively tell Native American stories to a broader audience.
“[Museums] might not be meant for us, but they are representing us, and they are doing so to thousands of people on a daily [basis],” Stevens said. “If we can’t put our voices there and try to instill some necessary corrective, we are not going to be able to move forward. This is a discourse that I would like to see continue and expand, where we are talking to each other [and getting on the same page].”
Stevens encouraged small, local museums to contact their regional NAGPRA officer or reservation specialist to learn more about their Native American collections. He also recommended the book “Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums,” by Amy Lonetree.
For free online resources on the Native cultures of the Western Hemisphere, visit americanindian.si.edu/.
To learn more about the Washburn Distinguished Lecture Series, contact Dr. Grazyna Kozaczka, professor of English and honors program director, at 315-655-7302.
