Who Owns History?

Thinking more about our discussion on Tuesday, and having read this New York Times article and the reactions to it, I want to explore the topic of “ownership” of the Holocaust a little more.  I am increasingly frustrated with the point of view that any one group should “own” history. It is critical that we respect those who lived through traumatic events, and those who are still affected by them today.  These survivors and descendants deserve the chance to tell their story and have their voices heard.  However, they do not “own” history.

The centrality of Jews in the story of Auschwitz and the Holocaust must remain.  However, efforts to overhaul the exhibitions at Auschwitz in order to serve a more educational purpose are a natural evolution.  Critical sites like these should not become historical footnotes of interest to small, directly affected groups.  Rather, they should share their lessons with the world.

Shared authority is one of our guiding concepts as public historians.  While we usually look at it from the perspective of museum professionals needing to give up some of their control, we shouldn’t forget that shared authority works both ways.  This concept also means that the “owners” of history also need to be less protective of their story, and allow it to be told in a way that will be instructive to a broader audience.

Creating the Future Through the Past

Is a museum a place where cultures go to die, or where they go to live?  According to James Clifford, the answer is increasingly the latter.  Museums are becoming places of cultural exchange, reciprocity, and contest.  They are becoming contact zones, where cultures enter into ongoing relationships.  According to Clifford, “When museums are seen as contact zones, their organizing structure as a collection becomes an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship – a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull.” [1]

We in the museum profession are sometimes conflicted between our desire to give other cultures a voice in our institution with our desire to maintain curatorial and interpretive control.  The Wampanoag Homsite at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, MA shows that giving other cultures a voice in an institution can substantially enhance the institution’s ability to accomplish its mission.

Image by Swampytank, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License

The Wampanoag Homesite is quite literally a “living” history site.  The interpreters and visitors at the site, as participants in a contact zone, are making history as they preserve it.  Not only does the Homesite educate visitors about the history and traditions of the Wampanoag people, but it also serves as a representation of Native People’s contemporary worldview.  It allows Natives to display their heritage, as well as to articulate their desire for recognition and respect in the present.

The creation of Plimoth Plantation’s Wampanoag Indigenous Program in the early 1970s was influenced by the cultural movements of the time.  During the 1960s and 1970s, Native groups attempted to fight back against the marginalization of Native Peoples in American culture and politics.[2] Although Plimoth Plantation had not ignored the Native perspective, it had previously been told from a European point of view.   The Plantation began outreach to the Wampanoag community in the early 1970s, with mixed results.  However, by 1972, two Wampanoag tribal members had joined the board of the museum, and by 1973, the Wampanoag Indigenous Program was established.[3] The early years of the Wampanoag Homesite were not without their difficulties.  It proved difficult to find Native People with sufficient knowledge of traditional crafts, and the museum had difficulty incorporating the Homesite into its administrative structure.[4]

Today, the Wampanoag Homesite is a thriving part of Plimoth Plantation.  Members of the Wampanoag and other tribes demonstrate traditional crafts such as basket weaving and boatbuilding.  Unlike the 1627 English village, the interpreters at the Wampanoag Homesite do not portray historical characters.  Although they wear traditional clothing, they speak in modern dialect and interact with visitors as themselves.  This fulfills the dual role of the Wampanoag Homesite as a place where Native culture can be represented in both its contemporary and historic forms.

There is an extensive Frequently Asked Questions section on the Plimoth Plantation website, which prepares visitors for their encounter with the Wampanoag culture.  Some of the questions cover basic cultural sensitivity issues, such as whether it is acceptable to greet interpreters with “How” (it is not), while others are more nuanced, explaining the reasons for calling the Wampanoag “Native People” rather than “American Indians”.  This is the nature of a contact zone.  Culture is constantly being defined, as each group learns and shares from others.  When museums allow themselves to become contact zones, they give up some control, but they gain power and strength by allowing multiple cultures to shape the institution.  By doing this, a museum not only enhances its ability to interpret the past, but also becomes able to shape the future.

[1] James Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 192

[2] Elizabeth A. Peterson, “Time Travelers Wanted: Re-Imagining the Past at Plimoth Plantation, 1965-1978” (MA thesis, State University of New York at Oneonta, 2009), 45

[3] Ibid, 52-55

[4] Ibid, 63-64

[5] “Wampanoag Homesite Frequently Asked Questions” http://www.plimoth.org/features/faqs/homesite-faq.php

Hidden Elves in Denver: The Artistry of the Museum Diorama

There are elves hidden in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. They live amongst white-tailed deer, pronghorns, and blue herons in the museum’s dioramas. Some hide in trees, while one is perched on a dinosaur’s back. But all of these elves are the creation of one man – artist Kent R. Pendleton.

According to museum lore, Pendleton was not allowed to sign his name to diorama backgrounds he painted. Instead, he hid the elves as a way to leave his mark on the exhibitions. Interested in finding all of the known elves? A “Seek and Find” of museum secrets is available at the front desk, as the DMNS has truly embraced the tiny, mythical creatures.

This acceptance signals two recent trends in museum dioramas: the reconsideration of dioramas as composed artworks and the recognition of those diorama artists. Today museum dioramas are problematic for many museums, as they generally represent turn-of-the-century colonial views within museology. However, for many visitors, dioramas continue to offer moments of wonder inspired by the natural world. By considering the artistry behind dioramas, museums can redefine the place of these exhibitions within the contemporary museum.

Created as scientific educational tools, dioramas pose taxidermied animals in a natural scene to offer a sense of the animal’s native habitat. At the American Museum of Natural History, artists went into the field to collect animal and plant specimens; each diorama is representative of an actual place in the natural world.

Artist Raymond deLucia works on a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in 1939. Source: the American Museum of Natural History website

Still, taxidermy, background, and foreground artists played a huge part in crafting the scene: how are the animals posed? Do they interact? How does the weather reflect the mood of the diorama? What is the spatial relationship between the taxidermies and the botanical models?

AMNH has developed online exhibition resources to shed greater light on its beloved dioramas. From biographies of the diorama artists to virtual tours and behind the scenes views, the dioramas website is replete with information about the creation of these composed scenes. The online video collection ranks among the best of these features. Many are recorded by Stephen Quinn, author of Windows On Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History, and use the backdrop of dioramas to situate historical research on their creation.

However, the website also includes archival footage of background artist James Perry Wilson painting the scene for the Fisher and Porcupine diorama in the Hall of North American Mammals. By illustrating the process and challenges of painting a large-scale diorama background as Wilson works, the narrator emphasizes the technical technique and artistry in the exhibitions.

In sharing the archival footage on the internet, the museum is able to recast the dioramas as artworks derived from scientific observation and study. This artistic perspective helps alleviate some of the problems of maintaining exhibitions of a different era. Above all, it elevates the work of talented museum professionals, obviously illuminating personal perspective and curatorial decisions to dioramas intended to mimic nature.

Displaying Ethnographic Objects

Museum exhibits have a purpose:  they tell a story, they teach you something, and they make you think.  Behind the scenes at a museum, people are working to help us learn and understand this story, but who should decide what we should learn from a museum?

This question becomes even more complicated when we consider the ethnographic objects of people who were traditionally marginalized by scientific racism, such as the people of the Northwest Coast Indian tribes.

In 1887, Franz Boas began to outline the way museums should display their ethnographic collections.  Boas is considered the father of modern American Anthropology.  His basis of study in science changed the way anthropologists examine the world.  Unlike most of his contemporaries, Boas believed that ethnographic exhibits should tell the visitor that culture is “relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only as far as our civilization goes.” [1]

Boas used this ideology to organize his exhibits, particularly the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians at the American Museum of Natural History.  He believed that “if the underlying idea of the exhibit can be brought out with sufficient clearness, some great truths may be impressed upon (the audience).” [2]  He organized the objects by a “tribal arrangement of collections,” not by object type, in order to teach the visitor the meaning of the object within that culture. [3]

Today, many museums strive to do just this in their exhibits.  Curators aim to help the audience understand the importance of objects to their origin culture.

This goal is at the heart of the 1989 meetings of the staff of the Portland Museum of Art and the Tlinglit elders about the objects in their Northwest Coast Indian collection.  The curators wanted to understand how the objects represented the culture of these tribes.  Unlike Boas, they asked representatives from the culture marking a key difference between how museums approach objects now.  However, it is what those present learned about these objects from the representatives is what is truly surprising and modern.

The museum professionals expected the elders to tell them about the objects, “for example:  this is how the mask was used; it was made by so-and-so; this is its power in terms of the clan, our traditions.” [4]  In reality the objects “provoked (called forth, brought to voice) ongoing stories of struggle.” [5]

Historian James Clifford argues that this experience is an example of when museums become contact zones.  A contact zone is “a space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations.” [6]

Ethnographic objects in museums are objects that invoke “histories (memories, hopes, oral traditions)” and work as tools of the contact zone to “challenge and rework a relationship.” [7]  When objects are seen this way, they become tools for “active collaboration and a sharing of authority.” [8]

Any time an object is used in a way that ignores its presence as a mutable object of a contact zone, it is subject to the dominant culture’s views.  Clifford believes that if we ignore these objects’ status within a contact zone, we continue to perpetuate “culture-collecting strategies” that are a reflection of old world views of “dominance, hierarchy, resistance, and mobilization.” [9]

Maybe, in reality, ethnographic objects don’t have a story.  They are continually changing because they reflect a continued story.  Next time you find yourself at an ethnographic museum think about the story.  What do the objects tell you?  Are they just reflections of another culture, or are they a reflection of what happens when two cultures meet?

I challenge you to think about what the museum wants you to learn about that culture and think about what that might be saying about our own culture.  We can learn more about contact zones and other cultures from the way we displayed these objects in the past and the way they are viewed by both cultures now.

 

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[1] Jacknis, Ira, “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museums Method of Anthropology,” Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture History of Anthropology, Volume 3, Ed. George W. Stocking, Jr (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 83.

[2] Ibid, 86.

[3] Ibid, 79.

[4] Clifford, James, “Museums as Contact Zones,” Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 188.

[5] Ibid, 193.

[6] Ibid, 192.

[7] Ibid, 194.

[8] Ibid, 210,

[9] Ibid, 213.

Similar Bank Accounts

One more point that struck me as I was reading Nickel and Dimed was the similarities between low-income workers and museums.  Ehrenreich points out over and over how there is simply an imbalance in the amount of money earned and the amount of amount of money needed to survive.  During my thesis research I looked at a lot of different museums’ income generated in comparison with their operation costs.  The cost per visitor is often more than double the amount museums generate in income from each visitor.  Admissions, food service, retail and facility rental at most make up about 30% of museum operating budgets.  So basically museums are doing what low-income workers do on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, low-income workers can’t write grants to supplement their income though.  But I wonder if this is another point of reference for museums to connect with low-income audiences.  Most visitors do not know the business side of museums, so maybe it would be interesting for visitors to understand that there are similarities between their bank accounts and the daily challenges of staying ahead.

Are museums inclusive of all points of view?

It’s our first day and we’re thinking about the ways we might apply our knowledge of the history of race, class, and gender to our careers as museum professionals.

Class, Race, and Gender

This course examines representations of class, race, and gender in American culture from 1900 to the present.  Its primary objective is to introduce students to a range of nonfiction and fiction works that explore one or more of these key concepts.  Engaging with the texts in this course will provide the basis for a rich conversation about the ways in which ideas of class, race, and gender have operated, and continue to operate, in American society.

As museum professionals, you will come into contact with many diverse communities throughout your careers.  In order to be effective museum leaders, it is imperative that you recognize the pluralistic nature of American life and learn how to work with people from many different backgrounds.  An important goal of this course, then, is to facilitate a process whereby you will be able to see American society and culture, both past and present, from a multiplicity of perspectives.