Navel Amulet: Challenging Paradigms of Repatriation
Silence of the Land
In Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology wrongfully live several navel amulets from peoples of the Plains regions in North America, their source communities unidentified by their collectors.The museum’s facade is a converted barn; a discrete monument that houses the spoils of global colonization and imperialism.
The barn lies on the land of Wampanoag and Narraganset peoples.
The land has witnessed in it its early histories: King Philip's War and the genocide of Rhode Island’s indigenous peoples, the institution of slavery; private ownership by Haffenreffer leading to class struggles between waves of European immigrants and the English elites, and the creation of the site as a museum of anthropology which is now under Brown University.
It now sits in the silence of a peace that was never waged, living in the paradigms of the museum and university world, collecting and trading indigenous items from as far as the Paiwan and Rukai peoples of Taiwan, for a purpose that is getting harder and harder to justify.
This "silence" was disrupted last year by the Po Metacom Camp, an encampment established by Pokanoket peoples asking Brown University for land back in a complicated claim that proves the museum’s early history is very much alive and still contested by various groups and stakeholders.
Yet the collections of Rudolf F. Haffenreffer(1902-1991) and Emma Shaw Colcleugh (1846-1940) maintain the myths of American empire building by constructing an image of the indigenous other that is stuck in the past; essentialized, and inferior to the nation state. The museum has over a million objects taken from colonized peoples around the world in theft or unequal exchanges.
The navel amulets are part of the Emma Shaw Colcleugh collection, acquired in Minnesota ca. 1875 and acquired by Haffenreffer in 1934. Details remain frustratingly scarce about history of the collection or histories of these amulets. However, the silence around one particular turtle-shaped figure stands out as a strong case to highlight the deep injustices and violations of indigenous material culture and humanity that are caused by museums as colonial entities, and the blind spots of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a legislation trying to right those wrongs. The amulet is a culturally sensitive object and the museum has refrained from displaying it or taking photographs after recent consultation with indigenous communities. I follow in that guideline and provide interpretative illustrations instead.
The navel amulet contains the umbilical cord of a child- it is a creation that holds glimpses of the relationship between mother, child, and all lives involved in the raising of children in the Plains communities. As peoples sometimes elect to be buried with the amulet, it also holds stories of death and peoples' relationship with death.
The concepts of motherhood, family, and the life cycle that are specific to each of the peoples of the Plains emerge from indigenous knowledge and are therefore separate from concepts that come from Western or other imperial ontologies. Yet the museum of anthropology claims stewardship of the object and claims to have the authority to teach museum goers about entire peoples through a limited understanding of the object- without explaining their subjective voice.
Thus I aim to stray far away from that methodology. It would be harmful for me as an outsider to try to explain the indigenous meaning of the amulet, especially drawing from colonial and Western texts. I will describe the naval amulet in a limited, critical manner, focusing on its political history and colonial encounters. I question not only why anthropology museums stress learning about peoples through objects, but also what it is we as students and scholars are trying to do with this learning.
For instance, what happens to those who learn about the dispossession of naval amulets from communities? Do we then try to learn about what modern day Plains Indigenous mothers and communities have to say, from the past to the present day? Do we criticize the museums and our academic institutions that have silenced the stories of these mothers and taken land from indigenous peoples? Do we try to support Native women in this country and their particular issues in reproductive health as well as overall social and political wellbeing? Or do we keep hoarding this knowledge within the space of the museum and the academy?
The presence of the navel amulets of the Plains peoples in the museum and the intimacy of the stories they suggest, illustrates the violence and dehumanization the colonial practice. By witnessing the remnants of that violence I stress the importance of urging museums to repatriate such objects, and to move away from the colonial storytelling and classification of peoples through objects.
I now know that museums such as the Haffenreffer are not a place for learning about indigenous peoples but rather about colonial methodologies. The voices that need to be heard are those of indigenous peoples themselves who want us to hear them, those who actively share and practice knowledge and resist despite the settler colonial society's tendency to appropriate and essentialize indigeneity.
"Neither Mother nor Child"
I was able to see the amulet in person, taken from a storage room at the Haffenreffer by curators who had offered their knowledge and assistance. Materially speaking, the amulet is a sack, oftentimes shaped like a lizard or a turtle, and beaded, which contains a child’s umbilical cord. It is usually made by mothers, and it becomes the child's first toy. The child then often keeps it as a protective amulet for life, and may be buried with it. The lizard may be identified with boys and the turtle with girls.
Each community under this vast category will have its own understandings of it. I stress again that in analyzing this object it is crucial to acknowledge the things we do not know, cannot know, and must not know about indigenous life ways and what this means for our visual consumption of the amulet as an object in a museum.
I ask myself. Are there some objects that we do not need to see? Some stories we, as outsiders, have no purpose to hear?
How must we go about learning about indigenous communities in order to increase our respect and awareness of native issues without benefitting from the material dispossession of communities perpetuated by museums?
For myself, witnessing an object so intimately tied to the cycle of life of particular communities, so complex and unable to be translated onto western ontologies, confined to a gray box in the storage of a museum produces a dissonant and disturbing experience.
I questioned the collector, Emma Shaw Colcleugh's practices in obtaining the object. I questioned the museum's denial to repatriate it despite the possibility that many of the amulets still contain umbilical cords. Given that this is an object that people are intended to keep for life I speculate that it was very likely attained in coercive terms- anything from being taken from a mother or a child, sold out of economic urgency and coercion, or taken from a grave as was common practice in the economy of ethnographic objects.
Standing before the object, the weight of these realities- the life of mother, the child, the coercive collector, the history of colonization in the U.S. (especially in its pursuit to hinder the reproduction of indigenous peoples) all come to mind. The amulet has unending dimensions and lives connected to it, from times long before settler colonialism, to today and the future. It has a beauty difficult to quantify, that is beautiful despite historical traumas of colonization, was beautiful before then and will be beautiful after then.
Standing before this creation, it is useful to bow one's head to what one cannot know. One cannot claim to understand the ideas and definitions of motherhood, childhood and child rearing that exist in the Plains communities. Likewise definitions of what is an amulet and what constitutes as human remains or objects worthy of repatriation cannot be essentialized. Yet the fact that the object cannot be repatriated under current NAGPRA legislation shows how indigenous knowledge has been disregarded in the law, despite it being a significant achievement for Native American activism (which is why there is a movement among scholars to decolonize NAGPRA). Under the NAGPRA definitions, this object, even if coming from a grave and containing human parts, does not qualify for repatriation.
With all of this depth in mind I reacted with certain apprehension and anger watching a curator examining the navel amulet with gloves, making qualitative judgments on its stitching and pattern; scientifically exploring something culturally sensitive, with the sanctity of life, something that transcends the scientific ways of seeing through which he was analyzing the object. Something that transcends object.
I asked him what would be some of the challenges to repatriate this object through NAGPRA, and he explained that parts of the body that can shed, for instance hair, nails, even fingers, are trickier to protect under the act, and that the umbilical cord was even harder to place, as it was "neither the mother nor child".
Neither Lost nor Orphan
The curator pointed out that the turtle amulet had a "defect" that made it impossible to identify with a source community. There was no pattern to the beading on the turtle's body. Therefore the curators could not speculatively connect it with any group through a signature or common pattern or color.The discourse of this unidentifiable amulet, seemingly unable to be returned to any home was used by the museum to justify its continual ownership of it. They see themselves as the best possible stewards for this item, better existing in the hands of the museums and used occasionally for teaching purposes than given (in any sort of imperfect solution) to a group of Plains peoples and buried.
Therefore it can be easy to frame the amulet as a tragically "lost", or perhaps an orphan. While this emotional framing seemed humanizing to me at first, I remembered the object cannot be either. It was not lost, but rather taken, and it was not orphaned as its source community does exist. It is just the museum institution that removed it from its original context and placed it in the museum context that did not necessitate the original community ties to the object for it to fulfill its purpose.
I wondered how many objects owned by museums suffer the consequence of this framing- of lost, of orphaned, of unidentified- rather than of stolen, of taken, of being remnants of cultural genocide. I wonder how these narratives contribute to the narratives of entire peoples being simply gone, disappeared, or their cultures being inevitably lost. I remember hearing in conversation with curators how some indigenous communities did not care about reclaiming their sacred items back because they had all converted to Christianity.
Yes communities are allowed cultural dynamism. Communities also often have more pressing issues at hand than their treatment in museums. However these are not reasons for a museum to justify its practices and its own history in contributing to the cultural genocide and misrepresentation of indigenous peoples. As indigenous peoples continue to fight to make NAGPRA a more just avenue for repatriation museums such as the Haffenreffer could contribute far more in this fight in acting less like the paternalistic authority willing to dole out certain small fragments of their collection, but being more collaborative and flexible and innovative in how the engage with communities and initiate repatriation processes.
Seeing objects not as lost orphans but as living memories that are not their to tell.
The Labors
While not needing to grasp and consume the spiritual and emotional significance of the navel amulet, I can appreciate weight of the histories of many kinds of labor it wears. Oral histories that are not heard in museums and not understood in academia; histories not ours to own or to know. Standing before the turtle shaped amulet I imagine the weight of histories belonging to the source communities, to the mothers and children.Histories about the labor having of children. The labor of birth. The labor of the making, the sewing, the beading, the gathering of material. The making of a pattern, of stylistic choices. The removal of the umbilical cord according to traditional ways. The having of children because of _____, or despite of ______ . The not having of children. The raising of children, the losing of children, or parents. The labor of a parent, of a community. The labor of growing up. The labor of keeping an object close.
This object is a testament, a living witness of the existence of motherhoods, and the challenges and triumphs of peoples. Through this connection the object lives today. Reproductive justice is a living issue in Native communities as well as other oppressed communities in the United States. While manifestations and descriptions this justice and these experiences can only come from the communities themselves, we as outsiders have access to witness the awful history of the U.S. government policies that have led to the violation of reproductive rights of Native mothers and communities. That access gives us a responsibility to stand in solidarity with indigenous peoples and pressure our governments to take action on Native issues. In many ways certain factors of the government and ruling classes have demonstrated through historical practices of eugenics and racist violence and classist exclusion that the lives of certain minority groups such as undocumented migrants, black peoples, and indigenous peoples are less valuable to their eyes. Thus less socially valued peoples face barriers to healthy and autonomous reproduction. In some ways then peoples have been able to see and frame having children as a form of resistance.
Whatever this resistance may mean to indigenous feminisms and however it may manifest, I would hope that the re-focusing on the stories and memories within the navel amulets can in a small way honor Native mothers, and that soon the focus from repatriation can shift on more anti colonial criticisms and truly de colonizing practices honoring the memory and resistance of all Native peoples.
