Image provided by: Oregon Historical Society; Portland, OR
About Spilyay tymoo. (Warm Springs, Or.) 1976-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 26, 2009)
“1 Spily^y Tymoo, Warm Springs, Oregon February 26, 2009 P^ge 7 Youth Art Exhibit at Museum The Museum at Warm Springs is now hosting the Sixteenth A nnual Tribal Youth A rt Exhibit. Some o f the items on display include: “Our Regalia” (top), created by youth in room A-3 at the Early Childhood Education Center. 'Tittle Indians” (below), created by youth in room B-2 atECE. Beaded items (right) by Soraya Yvana Mende% “Yaxla”. Other young artists featured on this page include Turak Newman, Charmaine Billy, Martin Smith Mannely, TaRonn Katchia, andECE Headstart 4year- olds. Dave McMechan photos National museum posts 5,500 art, artifact objects on line W ashington, D.C. — Jeri Redcorn was 54 years old when she first saw the beautiful clay pottery that would change the course o f her life. The pottery had been un earthed by archaeologists in Ar kansas and Louisiana. It was amazingly Eght-weight for its size, and vastly different from any American Indian pot tery she’d seen. A nd it was made by her Caddoan forbears for thousands of years. In the 160 years since the Caddo moved away from Ar kansas and Louisiana— first to Texas and later, escaping with their lives, to the plains of Okla homa—generations of Caddo people had never seen, nor heard of these iconic ancestral pots. The skills to make them had been lost. “We were overcome,” Redcorn recalled of that day in 1992. “An elder man, speaking for all o f us, said, ‘I didn’t know we did this.’” Now, at age 69, Redcorn is known for reviving the Caddo style o f pottery, and her pots are among the first 5,500 objects from the Smithsonian’s National Museum o f the American In dian collection to be posted online. The new service debuted ear lier this month. You can view the site at: www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/ searchcollections/home.aspx 800,000 items “I f I had had access to an L Mask among many items NMAI has posted on line. online collection o f Caddo art then, it would have made my life so much easier,” said Redcorn, who lives in Norman, Okla. The museum plans to post images and information about its 800,000-object collection on its website. T he purpose, said NMAI Curator Ann McMullen, is to make the site educational at the same time as bringing the col lection back into the heart of Native communities, at least digitally. Museums worldwide are ex perimenting with online data bases that allow the public to view their collections from home computers. Smithsonian Institution Sec retary Wayne Clough hosted a symposium at the National Mu seum o f the American Indian last m onth w here he talked about the importance o f digi tizing all 137 million objects in the Smithsonian museums— to bring the material to “young people, especially.” Few museums have ventured to post indigenous collections online,.in part out of a recogni tion of ethical concerns. Such issues are easy to medi ate with contemporary art by Ev- ing artists such as Redcorn. But when the artists and ob jects are historic, the museum must make sensitive decisions, including whether an object is too sacred to be p ut on the Internet. To date it has posted objects already on display in its muse ums, because tribes have ap proved their pubEc exhibition. T h e M useum o f N ew Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington attracts 63,000 hits a month for its online coEection o f 130,000 objects, said PhiEp Edgar, coEection information services manager. B ut his m useum has re frained from posting aE of its Taonga Maori coEection while it develops a process for con sulting with iwi, or tribes, espe- ciaEy for objects whose prov enance is unknown. Edgar said he wEl watch how NMAI deals with simEar ethi cal issues. The National Museum of the American Indian has been suc cessful in what it caEs commu nity curation, in which tradi tional culture bearers from Na tive communities advise cura tors about the care, maintenance and display of objects from their tribes. NMAI Associate Director for M useum Program s Tim Johnson, who is Mohawk, said the online coEection wiU expand that valuable input. “Now we can do curation via online chatting with someone in a Native community,” he said. The result wiE likely be a cor rection of the museum’s origi nal records. Many o f those documents were established by George Gustav Heye (1874-1957), the New York investment banker whose vast historic coEection was the foundation for the Na tional Museum of the American Indian. ‘You have to remember, the coEection was collected by a non-Indian, so the interpreta tion of that material was not from a Native perspective,” Johnson said. “The revolution o f this museum is to promul gate that interpretation of the coEection by tribes.” Those who use the onEne coEection, such as tribal elders and scholars, can easEy share insights and information about the artifacts with museum staff. Associated with every object is a contact button, through which web users can make com ments, send corrections, or ask to reprint photos. Curator Ann McMuEen is among the NMAI staff who wiE review the Internet correspon dence daEy. McMuEen has been working tow ard linking the public website with the museum’s own database since 2006. Staffers studied surveys fiEed out by tech-saw y Web users, elders, eighth-graders and pro fessional teachers, aE o f whom the museum imagined might use its onEne service. The “coEection search” site is programmed to recognize his toric as weE as contemporary names. A map o f the Americas aEows users to pick a geographic area to easEy find objects from a general location, if a tribe’s name isn’t known. “We wanted a grandparent to be able to go to a Ebrary with a chEd and use this,” McMuEen said. She knows there is work to be done, research that may de lay posting of the entire coEec tion for years. Sometimes a historic object may be identified by one tribe, but reaEy originated in another. As tribes correct this infor mation, McMuEen said, it wiE generate insight into gifting, trade, and exchange traditions among various nations, as weE as about famiEes who made ob jects. Truman Lowe, a H o Chunk artist and professor at the Uni versity o f Wisconsin, agreed: “It’s not only going to rein- vigorate history, it is also going to reinvigorate the art tradi tions.” In the same way, he said, the very existence of the National Museum of the American In dian, which was estabEshed by Congress in 1989, has provided important new Enks among gen erations. Lowe remembers when Hopi painter Michael Kabotie found a painting by his father, Fred Kabotie, in the NMAI coEec tion. As museum curators gath ered, Michael Kabotie sponta neously shared a history of art in his famEy and tribe. Much Eke Redcorn’s discov ery of her tribe’s pottery and her determ ination to revive the practice, Lowe anticipates that “a contemporary look at these objects opens a potential for the rebirth o f culture. I am more excited about the cross influ ences that wiE transpire. It hap pened historicaEy, and it’s al ready happening with contem porary artists. Technology has a way o f speeding up influences, variations on tradition.” To Redcorn, her work being part of the NMAI’s online col lection is one more sign that no one need go without knowing what Caddo pottery is. As she found in her effort to recover the Caddo potter’s art, the clay from the banks o f the Red River would be her great est teacher. Native art, she said, wiE usu- aEy lead back to something tac tile, Eke a river, a riverbank, a vein of clay. “Even though we had our language, songs and dances, so much was taken away from who we were—until we were on the plains singing an alEgator song where there were no alEgators,” Redcorn said. “Right now we are aE experiencing a lot of pride in who we are. I think that is great.” (Article by Kara- Briggs o f the N a tional Museum o f the American Indian news service.) J.
