“To try and hold a Soul”: A Cradle from Kiowa peoples
It is through unraveling and unknowing this history that healing of a kind can begin, healing as it stands to explain present situations and narratives that result from empire.
Firstly, the assigned topic of the course “Decolonizing Museums,” was to choose an “object” from a Native American community and write to the colonial context in which it was taken and thereafter acquired by a museum. The colonial context follows throughout the processes of the life and imprisonment of this object in a museum today. More important than such representations is the discourse surrounding the repatriation of Indigenous objects, possibly as a critical social undertaking for Indigenous communities. Though what are the limitations and capacities for Indigenous communities to pursue repatriation, and what responsibility do museums hold in such processes? These are significant questions to highlight when exploring objects and their futurity.
The object I chose to analyze or consider for this course is a lattice cradle from a Kiowa community in Comanche County. To be sincerely stated and recognized, I am outsider and hold no relations to this community. I do not know Kiowa peoples or the histories aside from what I read at university and am told by museum curators. Thereby, any of my understandings are understood through and hold the harm to perpetuate a colonial gaze and all its violences. And so, I chose a cradle because I was struck by the beginnings of life, the possibilities for future that children hold and held for community. I thought of the relationship between parent and child, mother and child and how cradleboards encapsulate or lend narrative to its significance. I wondered at the emergence, construction, and continuation of this tradition for a Kiowa community. Though, I likewise realize and acknowledge that I do not know the relations between parent and child for this community, and understand childhood from a western point of view.
Our class visited the Haffenreffer Museum of Ethnology in Bristol, RI to learn about and view the objects we had chosen to research. I had never been to this tucked away museum, not knowing it as a repository for about one million objects from various Indigenous communities and peoples. There is not a great deal I know about this object or the context of its acquisition by Rudolph Haffenreffer, who started the museum from his own amateur findings. The cradleboard was created by the first of two wives of Qui-ah-tone from Kiowa peoples; later inherited by Qui-ah-tone’s son, Guy Qui-ah-tone. Guy Qui-ah-tone then gifted the cradle to Dr. E. Everett Rowell for medical services rendered to his children. While the cradle was gifted, the colonial forces at play, in particular the implementation of racial capitalism in North America, left little options for Indigenous to survive their ways of life.
When new diseases and practices of genocide are introduced into Indigenous communities, what should be the repayment? And how should Indigenous communities conceptualize new forms of currency from a western gaze?
I have more questions than answers. Though upon further research I discovered that Barbara Hail, a former curator for the Haffenreffer Museum wrote to the history of cradles for Kiowa and Comanche peoples and families. Moreso, Hail included stories, histories, and narratives from Kiowa and Comanche peoples, the descendants of those whose cradles are now held in museums. The cradles were described in the text as a recent creation, from the mid-nineteenth century and depict a nomadic peoples. They are the result of Indigenous peoples of the plains region forced to move and survive white expansionism and settler colonialism. That survival was done in and through community, as is denoted by the cradle. Wherein, both parents would help create the cradle with the father constructing the wooden mold and mother created detailed beadwork. Though various Indigenous groups created cradles, each cradle denotes the symbols and expressions particular to that community. And the beadwork is passed down intergenerationally, evoking Indigenous knowledges and survivance as a type of transcendence.
I refrain from attempting to articulate the beauty of the cradle, as I believe no language outside the Kiowa community can understand the meanings behind its creation and use. What the cradleboard meant to the community should not be reduced to the aesthetic. An object is a living thing, an extension of a soul and holding life itself. Thereby, the soul lays claim to a history and narrative in the private context of interpersonal connection and possibly through public understandings of its condition and being."It was the creative expression of her spirit, like prayer, an expression that came from the center of her being.”
“The women began to make cradles… in thanksgiving and hope for the children… beyond the moment in which extinction seemed some imminent.”— N. Scott Momaday
When the objects from a peoples are manipulated, taken, and exploited it is as an extension of the group. Objects stand as more than a representation, but hold in themselves a soul and life. This life continues even in their holding. Therein, the label “object” is limited in its capacity to encapsulate the history, meaning, and possibilities imagined for and lived through the object in relation to peoples. This attachment and link between the object and peoples it originates from holds a meaning that cannot be fully understood under a colonial gaze or through colonial worldviews. There are meanings, imaginaries, and understandings of love only understood through a particular worldview, language, lived experience, and history.
Relying on Indigenous Labor and Knowledge to facilitate, construct, negotiate, and implement repatriation and cooperation
It is easy to conceptually and ideologically adopt historically and presently imposed, required, and forced Indigenous labor to initiate and follow through on processes of repatriation and decolonization. Power imbalances are most evinced in museum relations with Indigenous peoples. Museums, as they are rooted in and perpetuate colonialism and settler colonialism, normalize and essentialize Indigenous labor, removing themselves of any labor toward repatriation. Moves toward repatriation and cooperation are transposed to Indigenous researchers, thinkers, activists, thinkers, and communities. This conversation is violent in many ways as it places the labor on Indigenous peoples as well as decenters the critical social issues impacting Indigenous communities and the work done to address them.
It is critical to center Indigenous voices and modalities for storytelling and knowledge, rather than assume narratives and histories. The complicated and complex histories of Indigenous peoples speaks to past, present, and future imaginaries as well as possibilities for transcendence. Transcendence is evinced in Indigenous ways of knowing that ethnographic museums may attempt to represent or speak to but which are inaccessible. Such ways of knowing are through worldview, language, knowledges, religion, and cultural practices. There are expressions not meant to be understood and there are ways of living Indigenous that cannot be intellectualized. No matter the research I conduct and even from the point of view of Kiowa peoples, there is limitation to my knowledge because I do not come from that community and hold the lived experiences.
Writing to or attempting to decipher the meanings behind or revealed in an “object” is to try to understand a peoples. Again, and sincerely stated, I am an outsider and can imagine what childhood represents or speaks to through a western gaze as they shroud even my Diné cultural understandings of childhood. Moreover, all that I read about the acquisition of the object was written through a colonial gaze that stated the piece was legally sold. Legally sold is a claim at firstly legal credence and then global capitalism as marker of justification. Yet, all that empire demanded and exploited in its construction cannot be stated as only the loss of objects. There is a trauma that these objects harken to and reveal. Legal discourse was likewise utilized by the state as a manipulating and exploiting methodology. The trauma experienced by Kiowa peoples is not something I can write to or read about without having lived it. These are the narratives that remain silenced. The workings of empire that forced peoples to sell or even transpose the culture and language barriers to understand what selling an object meant are largely erased or silenced.
To analyze an object is to only ponder the (un)known and never to know it, to conceive of the object’s possibilities, histories, and relationships once in community. To imagine what once was and to realize what is now. The processes of life continue in its stolen self, its taken and never returned being.
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