Journal of the History of Collections Advance Access originally published online on July 21, 2006
Journal of the History of Collections 2006 18(2):237-247; doi:10.1093/jhc/fhl012
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Blackfoot culture and world culture
Contexts for the collection and display of the decorated shirt of Issapoomahsika (or Crowfoot) in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter
The collection history and subsequent display in Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum of the decorated shirt and leggings of the Blackfoot chief, Crowfoot, are explored in this article. Crowfoot was active in the 1870s, a time of mounting tension across the Western Plains in both Canada and the United States brought on by the arrival of the railroads and territorial expansion. Cecil E. Denny, who collected this sacred costume, was an officer in Canada's North–West Mounted Police and was involved in the negotiations between the Canadian government and the Blackfoot people which sought to pacify the region. This article argues that curatorial practices at Exeter in the late-nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century omitted the circumstances of Denny's acquisition, exhibiting these garments as generic examples of clothing. By recovering the circumstances of Denny's encounter with Crowfoot, the article restores some complexity to the items he acquired.
1 The ‘World Cultures’ collections were given ‘special designation status’ and awarded a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund in order to fulfil an ‘essential function ... of increasing understanding between [world-wide] communities’. Information from Len Pole, previous Curator of Ethnography at the RAMM in an unpublished statement and background notes written for the opening of the ‘World Cultures’ exhibition and newly refurbished galleries ( June 2000).
2 The tribal name ‘Blackfoot’ refers to part of a larger group of affiliated peoples including Blackfeet, Bloods, Piegans, Atsinas and Sarcee. The first three of these groups spoke a similar language and were referred to historically as ‘Blackfoot’. Crowfoot was born a Blood Indian but became the adoptive son of a Blackfoot man who had become the husband of Crowfoot's mother. See Hugh A. Dempsey's biography, Crowfoot; Chief of the Blackfeet (Edmonton, 1972), pp. 3–11.
3 John M. Mackenzie (ed.), The Victorian Vision – Inventing New Britain, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 2001), p. 263 (cat. no. 255). The shirt has since been returned to the RAMM and, although still available to be viewed, is currently being rested from the artificial lights of the gallery. I would like to thank Ms Jane Burkinshaw, Assistant Curator of Ethnography at the RAMM, for this information and for her continuing help in my researches.
4 Most recent discussions of the processes of collecting and exhibiting have emphasized the context for such activities in attitudes held towards the museum in Victorian and late-Victorian culture, see for instance, James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1988); George W. Stocking Jr, Objects and Others, Essays on Museums and Material Culture (Madison, 1985); and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet, ‘Objects of ethnography’, in Ivan Karp and Stephen D. Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Display (Washington and London, 1991), pp. 386–443.
5 George T. Donisthorpe discusses some of the reasons for a delay in the establishment of a museum in Exeter in an account of the Origin and Progress of the Devon and Exeter Albert Mmemorial Museum (Exeter, 1868), pp. 5–6.
6 Nicky Levell emphasizes the ideological underpinnings of the educative role which Exeter's museum was meant to play within the local community, see ‘Discontinuous histories: The Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, and its African collection, 1868–1996’, in Anthony Shelton (ed.), Collectors. Expressions of Self and Other (London, and Museu Antroplogico da Universidade de Coimbra, 2001), pp. 181–204.
7 See Donisthorpe, op. cit. (note 5), p. 17; Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Annual Report of the Devon and Exeter Albert Mmemorial Museum (Exeter, 1886–7), pp. 5–6. Quotes are taken from Levell, op. cit. (note 6), p. 185.
8 Anon. [Exeter City Council], ‘The purposes of the Museum’, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, a Brief Description of its History and Collections (Exeter, 1964), n.p.
9 Issues concerning ethnographic display and interpretation within the museum are intelligently assessed in Karp and Lavine, op. cit. (note 4).
10 An influential study of these issues is found in Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa, Museum, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (New Haven and London, 1994).
11 Although several variations exist for the spelling of Crowfoot's name in his own language, I have chosen to follow that used in Alison K. Brown's review of the exhibition held at the RAMM, ‘Crowfoot and the Crown: the Signing of Treaty 7’, Journal of Museum Ethnography 17 (2005), p. 245. The author was involved with the curatorial team in both setting up a collaboratively taught course entitled ‘Collecting Cultures in the Nineteenth Century’ involving RAMM staff and in the planning and execution of an exhibition titled Crowfoot and the Crown: The Signing of Treaty 7 (held from 18 September 2004 to 15 January 2005). This collaboration between the RAMM and the art history department at the University of Plymouth was specially funded through the GLAADH (Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History) project. For further information about GLAADH and its rationale, see www.glaadh.ac.uk.
12 Royal Albert Memorial Museum's loan register, handwritten entry for 16 May 1878 (RAMM archives).
13 Minutes of the Museum sub-committee meeting for 3 June 1878 recorded the following: ‘Curator reported that Miss Denny wished to place on loan in the museum a very handsome Dress purchased by her brother from the Principle [sic] Chief of the Blackfeet Indians at Bow River, North America.’ See Jane Burkinshaw, unpublished notes, ‘The Cecil Denny collection of North American material at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum,’ undated, p. 2.
14 For a list of all those who participated in the ride out west to establish the Mounted Police, see A. L. Haydon, The Riders of the Plains. A Record of The Royal North–West Mounted Police of Canada, 1873–1910 (Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, 1971), Appendix A, p. 355. For Denny, see entry in Who Was Who 1916–1928, 2 (London, 1992), p. 216.
15 The link between Confederation and the question of a transcontinental railway is made in Brian Titley, The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney (Vancouver, 1999), p. 25.
16 The sympathetic ‘Meriam Report’ of 1928 was significantly subtitled ‘The problem of Indian administration’, see Brian Dippie, The Vanishing America. White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, 1982), pp. 298–300. A. L. Haydon's The Riders of the Plains contains an entire chapter called ‘Indian problems’, op. cit. (note 14), pp. 52–69.
17 American governments after the Revolutionary Wars maintained a British centralized system of dealing with Indian affairs. In 1824, the Office of Indian Affairs was created within the War Department, later to take the appellation, Bureau of Indian Affairs. In Canada, the 1867 British North America Act and the Indian Act of 1868 helped to consolidate the new Dominion's policies towards American Indians as administered by the Department of Indian Affairs, also based on earlier British models. See Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian (Oxford and New York, 1985), pp. 190, 206.
18 A recent study of the Indian treaty-making policies in both Canada and the USA in this period argues that geographical, economic and institutional factors created vastly differing contexts in the two national situations such that Canada's history of treating with the original inhabitants was bound to follow a different course from that of the USA. For example, in the era of the 1870s, the USA stopped their peace treaty-making turning instead to a policy of warfare just as the Canadian government began their treaty-making era, see Jill St Germain, Indian Treaty-Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867–1877 (Toronto, 2001), p. 13. Also, Waldman, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 187–8.
19 Titley, op. cit. (note 15), pp. 43–7.
20 An account of this battle from the American Indian perspective is told in Dee Brown, Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee. An Indian History of the American West, 1971 (London, 1976), pp. 217–47.
21 Dempsey (op. cit. (note 2), p. 90) suggests that Sitting Bull had entered Canada as early as December 1876.
22 The Riel rebellions are discussed in Waldman, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 160–4.
23 The meetings between Canadian officialdom and Sitting Bull are discussed in Haydon, op. cit. (note 14), pp. 70–84.
24 It has been argued that the North–West Mounted Police were organized initially to patrol the building of the transcontinental railway, with their other duties placed second to that. See Robert Thacker, ‘Canada's Mounted: the evolution of a legend’, Journal of Popular Culture 14, 2 (1980), pp. 298–9.
25 Haydon, op. cit. (note 14), pp. 20–3.
26 See Haydon, p. 355. Crowfoot's meeting with Colonel Macleod is recounted in Dempsey, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 79–80.
27 Dempsey, op. cit. (note 2) pp. 89–90, relates the essentials of this meeting and states that a copy of Crowfoot's ‘speech’ was sent to Queen Victoria.
28 Cecil Denny seems to have signed the 1877 Treaty 7 documents as a witness, where Haydon lists him as a ‘C. E. Dening’. See Haydon, op. cit. (note 14), p. 362. The Blackfoot people have their own name for their group, ‘Siksika’, as do the Bloods, ‘Kainah’, the Sarcee, ‘Tsuu-T’ina’ and the Stoney, ‘Nakoda’.
29 From the Blackfoot viewpoint, it was never a treaty to agree surrender of land to the Canadian government, as this would constitute giving away ‘a part of themselves’. Poor understanding on the part of the essentially non-Blackfoot speaking interpreters has been shown to have been one of the major obstacles to proper negotiation and treaty-making at Blackfoot Crossing in 1877. See Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council with W. Hildebrandt, D. First Rider and S. Carter. The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty Seven (Montreal and Kingston, 1996).
30 Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council, op. cit. (note 29), p. 260.
31 Dempsey, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 88, 91–2.
32 Crowfoot did show his awareness of the inabilities of the newcomers to keep their word once a treaty was signed and is said to have seen in a vision the future his people suffering and dying if they did not make peace in 1877. See Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council, op. cit. (note 29), p. 73.
33 The hand-written entry in the Museum's loans register appears thus: Dress of Sapo-omach-socah (Crows big foot) Principal chief of the Blackfoot From Bow River a tributary of the Saskatchewan, Montana N.W. America brought home by Cecil Denny Esq. consisting of the following Articles: Head dress (1), Robe of Deer's leather (1), Pair of Leggings (1 pair), Bow Case and quiver of Otter fur (1), Bunch of Eagle feathers (1), Bow (1), Arrows – iron headed (4), Arrow-point of hornstone (3), Mocassins (4 pairs), Mittens (1 pair), Whips (3), Embroidered Bags (3), Rattle (1), Sling Shot (1), Dagger or scalping knife (1), Necklace of beads and teeth (1), Charm (1) (totalling) 29. Burkinshaw relates that Denny's entire collection was purchased by the RAMM for £10 after he had offered it to the Museum in 1904. See the unpublished notes, Burkinshaw, ‘Cecil Denny collection’, op. cit. (note 13), p. 1.
34 Titley, op. cit (note 15), pp. 49–50.
35 Dempsey, op. cit. (note 2), p. 89. Titley (op. cit. (note 15), p. 50) also mentions that Denny got on well with the local Indians and that he drank to excess.
36 Who Was Who 1916–1928, op. cit. (note 14), p. 216.
37 Quoted in Ralph T. Coe, Sacred Circles. Two Thousand Years of North American Indian Art (London, 1976), p. 18.
38 The need for a display-case for the items loaned by Denny is mentioned in the minutes of the Museum sub-committee meeting, recorded 3 June 1878 (RAMM archives). See a copy of the handwritten letter from Blanche Dewdney to Royal Albert Memorial Museum, dated 12 March 1920: ‘Some years ago my husband and I were on a visit to Exeter while home from British Columbia. We saw in the Museum an Indian Chief's suit – I think it had belonged to "Crowfoot" chief of the Blackfeet Indians. My husband was very interested having known the Chief very well ... he told me that after his death he would like me to offer some of this collection to the Exeter Museum’. Letter in the Dewdney file, Paper archive, DDF 1512, RAMM.
39 Donisthorpe, op. cit. (note 5), p. 25.
40 Anon [Exeter City Council], op. cit. (note 8), n.p.
41 Some of these conclusions have been inferred from archival photographs taken of the Americas galleries prior to the establishment of ‘World Cultures’ in 1999 and from personal experience in the galleries while I was resident in Exeter from 1984 to 1992.
42 For Pitt Rivers see William Ryan Chapman ‘Arranging ethnology. A.H.L.F. Pitt Rivers and the typological tradition’, in Stocking, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 15–48; and for Boas see Ira Jacknis ‘Franz Boas and exhibits. On the limitations of the museum method of anthropology’, ibid., pp. 75–111.
43 The posts of Curator and Assistant Curator of Ethnography were established in 1996 and 1994, respectively, at RAMM.
44 Within ‘World Cultures’, at the centre of the main display, is an open-sided structure with a painted corrugated-iron roof. Devised by Len Pole, the Curator of Ethnography at the time, it is intended to symbolize the colonial context for the formation of collections.
45 The special nature of objects in museum collections is summarized in Stephen Greenblatt ‘Resonance and wonder’, in Karp and Lavine op. cit. (note 4), pp. 42–56. Since my initial research began on Crowfoot's shirt, the RAMM in collaboration with the art history department at the University of Plymouth curated a re-display of this item entitled Crowfoot and the Crown: The Signing of Treaty 7 (see note 11 above).
46 With the recent opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, in September 2004, with its innovative displays of indigenous history and culture clearly directed from Native American viewpoints, a new museological paradigm has been offered to the international museum community. The NMAI retreats from an object-based form of display and instead attempts to offer its audiences a refocused presentation of its collections emanating from newer practices such as ‘community curation’ and non-linear constructions of discourse.
Address for correspondence Dr Stephanie Pratt, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth, Earl Richards Road North, Exeter ex2 6as. s.pratt{at}plymouth.ac.uk