What visitors are saying about the Blackfoot Shirts Project exhibition

Here are some of the comments from the visitors' book. I've never see so many longer comments before, and people are reading the book and referring to each others' comments too. It's really interesting.

• These shirts belong to a people who are still in existence. They should be given back. Period. Then get them to make new shirts to display in this museum. It’s nothing to do with how fragile they are. It’s to do with being objects which have deep meaning. Please give them back.

• Wonderful exhibit but makes me sad that their culture was ever stifled. The shirts should go back- or should they? They were traded; these shirts were not taken to squash the culture but were given as a sign of goodwill that we should ALL learn from.

• I travelled here from Australia to see the museum and this exhibition after reading about the project. Good luck with it all and congratulations to the project team.
• Christeen Schoepf, Phd candidate, UNE Armidale NSW

• This is an amazing and impressive exhibit. I’m an archaeologist specializing in Southeastern (USA) Native American archaeology, and I find this a very touching story.

• I actually came to the Pitt Rivers to ‘fill time’ as have been here many times over the years. This is why temporary exhibitions are so important, they keep museums alive. I found this exhibition very emotive- I was close to tears. As a conservator who has studied museology in the past- I would hope that at least a long term loan can be organised- I find that people engaging with objects is more important than any ‘small’ amount of damage this may or may not cause. This stuff is alive- it has had a tremendous impact on the Blackfoot people- surely that is more important than having them in ‘dead’ displays- I agree with A.Morton who commented earlier- great if replicas could be made and displayed here- let them have one!  [Shrops.]

The (Blackfoot) ancestors, teaching at Oxford

Since opening the exhibition Visiting with the Ancestors: the Blackfoot Shirts Project in late March, something very special has been happening at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Actually, many special things have been happening.

Visitors are actually working their way all around the room, reading all the exhibition texts and looking at the images and labels. (This is not supposed to happen: museum visitors tend to look at labels for no more than about 30 seconds, and they don’t generally read all of the text in an exhibition.) They are also spending longer in the exhibition than is usual for our temporary exhibitions.

They are also looking closely at the shirts themselves, and at the other objects in the exhibition: the legging, the new shirt, the students’ art work in response to the shirts, and the new quillwork.

Then they are also writing in the visitor comment book. I’m going to have to get a second comment book, because the first one is nearly full. The last panel of the exhibit asks, ‘what do you think about this project?’ and visitors really are telling us. Comments range from ‘the shirts are cool’ to ‘Please send them home.’ People are writing entire pages of comments, and leaving their email addresses. This week, a visitor added suggested readings in her comments, and also inserted a page in the book with reading suggestions. Visitors are responding to earlier visitor comments: there is dialogue going on in the book.

In my experience this is unusual. I am also surprised by the level of support voiced for the project, for Blackfoot people and heritage, and for the idea of visits of important objects home. I’ll transcribe some of the comments here soon, and we are now doing some serious visitor experience analysis, and interviews with visitors. What we’ve seen so far has been both intriguing and heart-warming.

Things we have learned from the Blackfoot Shirts Project

Detail, Blackfoot shirt 1893.67.1, Pitt Rivers Museum. 

The membrane under the quill wrapping is visible in the centre of the image.

Today I’m giving a talk to colleagues here at the Pitt Rivers Museum about the Blackfoot Shirts Project. Since most of them have been part of the project—indeed in many ways it has been their project more than mine, I just write the grants and give the occasional shove—there actually isn’t much about it that they don’t know. So, I thought I would talk about what we all learned from the project, in different ways.

For those of you who haven’t been following this, the Blackfoot Shirts Project in a nutshell is: a group of us brought 5 hide and quill and hairlock shirts, collected in 1841, from Oxford back to museums in Blackfoot country, and invited 500 Blackfoot people to touch them. Not surprisingly, amazing things happened, and we are still thinking about responses to the shirts. You can learn more about the project at: http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/blackfootshirts/

So what did we learn?

Firstly, by spending a lot of time preparing the shirts for travel and then looking at them closely with Blackfoot people, we learned about the shirts: that some of the decorative material is not porcupine quill but bulrush, for instance. We learned about paints and dyes (who knew that blue was from duck poop?). We realized that the quill wrappings on the hairlocks are done over a foundation of some kind of membrane which is slipped over the bundles of hair: pericardium? Vein? We realized that there are the long-dead carcasses of nits still clinging to the hairs. And we realized that the shirts’ histories, before and after collection, are there to be seen: coal dust from the Hopkins’ home, tack marks from being stuck to the walls, bits of red ochre on the inside from contact with men painted for spiritual protection.

We tend to see the surface of objects in museums. It’s only when you spend this much time and energy really, really looking hard that you see beyond that, to the processes of making and storing and displaying that make up an object’s histories.

And we learned that these are not ‘objects’: they are also material forms of spirits, of those who made and used them, and those whose physical bodies are present in the hides, sinew, quills and hair. For Blackfoot people, these are ancestors, not museum specimens.

Having learned this, we think differently about the shirts now that they are back at PRM. We have a stronger sense of stewardship and of Blackfoot people as having ties to the shirts: we feel accountable. We have realized that just because objects enter museums, their lives don’t stop. They can go out and have adventures. One of these very old, very rare, very fragile shirts was used in a ceremony while we were in Alberta. We realized that it might have acquired some sacred paint during the ceremony, and we decided that if that was the case, we would not think of it as damage: it would be a mark of the shirt’s ongoing life. For a museum, that’s learning quite a bit.

Visiting with relatives...in Oxford

Over the past few years, a group of Blackfoot shirts at the Pitt Rivers Museum has been the focus of a remarkable project to enable Blackfoot people to reconnect with and learn from these important heritage objects. The first thing that we learned was that the shirts are not simply 'objects': they are collections of animate spirits. Three of the shirts have hairlocks of human and horse hair, which denote them as sacred. The shirts were collected in 1841 by Edward Hopkins, the secretary to the governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. When he retired in 1870, he moved to England and took the shirts with him. His family transferred them to the Museum in 1893 after his death.

We wanted to make it possible for Blackfoot people to literally reconnect with these ancestors, to actually touch them gently and learn from them directly. We worked with Alison Brown at the University of Aberdeen, who has a long history of working with Blackfoot people, and the Head of Conservation at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Heather Richardson, who did an internship at the National Museum of the American Indian, working on---their Plains shirts exhibition! Heather agreed to come to Alberta with us, Alison organized small group workshops, the Glenbow and the Galt Museums agreed to host us, and we took the ancestors home for a visit.

Wonderful things happened as a result. Ceremonial leaders, elders, artists, teachers, and college and high school students learned and shared so much knowledge with each other. People sang honor songs to the ancestors, brought them gifts, touched them gently, were moved to tears by their beauty and power. Students learned to do hide tanning and a bit of porcupine quillwork in preparation for meeting their ancestors, and one community revived a ceremony that had been dormant for many decades.

We also wanted to make it possible for museum visitors in the UK to learn from the shirts, and about the importance of the shirts to Blackfoot people today. We wanted to communicate about this kind of work, which is becoming such a part of what museums do. This week, we are opening an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum called 'Visiting with the Ancestors,' which features three of the shirts, and images and words from Blackfoot participants in the project. The exhibit tells the story of the project, of what happened when the shirts went home for a visit, of how Blackfoot people feel about the project.

To celebrate the exhibition opening, we are delighted to have Blackfoot guests, an extended family of people who have brought their infant grandson to visit with the ancestors. And to visit with us. It means a lot when relatives visit from overseas.

Curators and Ceremonies

Detail, Blackfoot shirt 1893.67.3, Pitt Rivers Museum

In the summer of 2012, I attended a traditional Blackfoot ceremony in Alberta, Canada. These days, with museums developing relationships with Indigenous communities, curators are sometimes invited to ceremonies as part of the process of relationship-building and to educate us about their cultures. I have had the privilege of working with Blackfoot people and attending ceremonies with them since 2001.

There are protocols for attending Blackfoot ceremonies. Women wear moccasins and long skirts and shawls, and I have a special set of clothing that I keep for these occasions. It is not permitted to photograph or take notes during ceremonies: you are expected to learn by observing and thinking about what you see, and taking it into your heart. Since traditional knowledge is passed on experientially and by various forms of initiation, it is also not appropriate to describe ceremonies online, especially for an outsider such as myself. Sometimes, though, there are things that I notice during ceremonies that have more to do with the bigger picture of what is happening, rather than what is going on in the ceremony, and these observations can be a way of learning. They can, especially, be a way of learning why it is that a museum curator like myself comes to be sitting in a ceremony, feeling clumsy and bewildered, hoping desperately not to make embarrassing mistakes. There’s a reason you’re here.

June 2012, somewhere in Blackfoot Territory, Alberta, Canada: Two enormous tipis have been pinned together to hold everyone for the ceremony, and they are now billowing and creaking in a prairie windstorm. It is a bit like being on a sailboat in a high wind. There is a fire in the other tipi near the elders and those who are running the ceremony; I can smell the smudge and hear the fire crackling, but am tucked in a corner and can’t see them. The grass sticks to my moccasins, the food is incredibly generous, and whoever put the berries in the frybread is a genius.

There is such a good feeling here, it’s relatives and friends gathering to be blessed and to support those holding the ceremony, and those of us ‘from away’ are welcomed warmly by friends. At one point there’s a pause in the proceedings while people are invited to have their faces painted, which is a way of blessing people, asking for protection and assistance. We all line up and as I am waiting my turn, I notice two little girls in front of me who look like they are about 4 and 7 years old. They go up to the ceremonial people who are painting us, completely confident. They tell their Blackfoot names to the woman who is praying for them, they know the prayer, they turn around at the right time, give the blessings back to the woman who is praying for them, and go skipping off together after it’s done, braids bouncing behind them.

These beautiful, confident girls have no idea of the weight of history and politics behind this. It’s normal to them. Where we are, what we are doing, what they have just done, is precisely what missionaries and government tried to destroy. I am humbled and very moved: what incredibly strong people, to have survived everything they have been through and to raise such children. It’s a reminder about why we are learning to work together across cultures. Every time I wonder why I am doing this work, I will remember those little girls.

Dancing in (and outside) the Museum

Haida dancers on lawn outside Pitt Rivers Museum and Oxford University
Museum of Natural History, September 2009. Photograph by Drew Davey.

In September 2009, the Pitt Rivers Museum was delighted to host a visit by nearly two dozen members of the Haida Nation, whose homeland is Haida Gwaii, a group of islands between Vancouver Island and Alaska. The Museum’s collections include a magnificent totem pole and some 300 other objects from Haida Gwaii. We wanted to learn more about these objects and to provide access to them for Haida people, and we hoped to create a permanent relationship with the Haida Nation around the collections to address these needs.

The visit was overwhelming. Few research visits of that scale have ever occurred, and retrieving, photographing, conserving, and updating records for 300 objects was a huge task. It was a great success, despite its challenges, and one of my abiding memories of the visit is of Haida song and dance, and of Haida drums echoing through the museum and across the front lawn. Music and dance have been an important focus for reclaiming cultural practices on Haida Gwaii after the decades of assimilation policies. Haida delegates wanted very much to share their culture through dance performances, and we created several opportunities: a potluck supper for the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and public events held on the lawn outside the Natural History Museum. Dance also occurred in the research rooms with some of the objects that we were all looking at: a salmon dance wand, with moveable jaws, was danced gently with its appropriate songs. I will remember the ‘clack, clack’ that the jaws of the salmon wand made for the rest of my life.

Museum staff usually see objects lying motionless. To see dance wands, button blankets, headdresses and masks in action adds a special dimension to our understanding of the objects we care for, and reminds us that they belong to living traditions. For members of the public in Oxford to whom the totem pole is a much-loved part of the Museum, seeing and listening to Haida people was the first opportunity that most had ever had to experience some of the cultural context for the pole. It was also a reminder that the pole belongs to the Museum in some ways, but continues to belong to Haida people in other ways.

Part of maintaining a permanent relationship involves simply keeping in touch, and several of us at the Museum are Facebook friends with Haida people whom we met during that visit in 2009. Over the past few months, there have been two major earthquakes on Haida Gwaii, of 7.7 and 7.2 magnitude, with numerous serious aftershocks. As I read the anxious postings of Haida friends, and then the reassurances they sent each other that all was well, I was reminded both of how fragile human societies are, and of how strong.

Haida friends, we are thinking of you, all the way over here in Oxford.

A video made about the Haida visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum, ‘Everything was Carved,’ is available on our website and is also available on Vimeo.

You can see photographs of the Haida collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

You can also search on the Museum’s database for ‘Haida’.

Samuel Black's Bag (PRM 1893.67.183)

PRM 1893.67.183

Some objects pull you back to them every time you see them, no matter how many years you’ve looked at them. For me, this is one such object. It’s an embroidered and beaded cloth bag made for Samuel Black, from Aberdeen in Scotland, who became a fur trader in western Canada. He had two successive wives—probably the daughters of senior fur traders and their Aboriginal wives—and a number of children. Although his marriages  were not legitimated in church, he abided by the fur trade custom of marriage ‘according to the custom of the country,’ which involved treating an Aboriginal or Metis woman as a legitimate wife. His will was contested by his Scottish family, who saw his children as illegitimate.

Black was not an easy man. George Simpson, the head of the Hudson’s Bay Company, described him as 'the strangest man I ever knew...A perfectly honest man and his generosity might be considered indicative of a warmth of heart if he was not known to be a cold blooded fellow who could be guilty of any Cruelty and would be a perfect Tyrant if he had power...Has not the talent of conciliating Indians by whom he is disliked'. In fact, he was murdered by an Aboriginal man in early 1841. Nevertheless, some woman loved him enough to make him this extraordinary bag. It has his name on one side—extraordinary in itself, because at least one of Black’s daughters signed various documents with the x that indicates illiteracy, and it seems likely that none of his 'country' family was literate. Even more extraordinary is the design worked on the reverse of the bag, on the side worn next to the body: a heart motif. This is not the usual urn and spray of flowers motif one usually sees on such items; hearts are uncommon. Made probably by one of Black’s daughters of mixed ancestry, I think it means what most of us would think it means: it’s a symbol of love.

Detail, reverse, PRM 1893.67.183

And so, in exquisitely tiny stitches, the colours faded but still gorgeous, this woman’s embroidery still speaks: of love, of the bridges between cultures, of a life that moved from Scotland to fur posts and Aboriginal camps. When we say of museum objects, ‘it’s Cree’ or ‘it’s Chinese’ or ‘it’s Scottish,’ we don’t often think of such complex cultural paths. Our lives often have them, though, and it’s a reminder that people have always loved across cultural boundaries.

I’ve written more about the bag in various places:

2009 ‘Material Culture, Identity, and Colonial Society in the Canadian Fur Trade’. In Maureen Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., Women and Things, 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies. Ashgate.

1999.  “ ‘Many Tender Ties’: The Shifting Contexts and Meanings of the S BLACK Bag.” World Archaeology, 31(2), fall 1999, 288-302.