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• 1 media/VMMH7JJIBFAVFHJPR5QDNTLSLM.jpg media/haida-ladle.jpg 2018-01-18T18:44:41-08:00 Haida Ladle: Haida Nationhood and Survivance 33 By Sierra Edd image_header 2018-01-19T11:20:27-08:00

  Erasure and Trauma:

  Examination of the ladle's past cannot be separated from its present—its socio-economic implications and colonial structures of power in which it has existed until today. The ways of understanding objects in anthropological museums must not ignore their own legacies as participants and producers of colonialism. The Haida Ladle expresses the relationship between settler and native, the moment European settlers made contact with the Haida, and the ways in which their sovereignty became defined through their suppression by the colonial state.
  
  From the limited knowledge that I have access to as an outsider, I can observe the colonial context of the ladle and how it came to the Haffenreffer. The Haida feast ladle was created in the 1880s from the Haida First Nations community in the Queen Charlotte Islands, and later collected by Rhode Island journalist and school teacher, Emma Shaw Colcleugh in 1884-1889 (Hail, 1991). The handle of the ladle is carved from mountain goat horn and the bowl is carved using the horn of the big horn mountain sheep (ESC Scrapbook, 58).  The King Philip Museum (later named the Haffenreffer Museum), in Bristol, Rhode Island acquired a handful of collections from donors like Colcleugh who personally collected Native objects (Passionate Hobby, 120). Emma Shaw Colcleugh represented one of few white observers surveying Canada and the Indigenous communities in the sub-arctic region. The colonial context of this exchange between Colcleugh and the Haida can be seen in her writing:

  “The Haidahs, physically far superior to any other Indians along the Pacific coast, have not only been the lords of these islands, but, for long years they were the terror of the coast settlement in British Columbia” (Colcleugh, 56). “All [the Haida Ladles] exhibit a surprising degree of excellence in workmanship. The native talent varies” (57).

  Colcleugh’s role as a traveling journalist and collector functioned to separate the “Indigenous” as the barbaric other, a political assertion motivated to open the frontier for European settlement. The ways she describes the Haida people demonstrates her limited knowledge of Haida culture and the complex the social and political structures of the community. Despite her broad assumptions about the Haida, her journals become apart of a large body of influential writing from the frontier that contributes to the Euro-American narrative of the "vanishing Indian" associated with the salvage anthropology movement. The representation of Indigenous peoples in museums from this moment onward depict Native people in reductionist ways that discount an expanse of knowledge through community narratives, oral histories, and counter-histories from Indigenous nations.
  
  The existence of the ladle indicates an exchange of colonialism documenting an ongoing narrative of trauma of the Haida and the colonial life of Emma Shaw Colcleugh. In 1930, Emma Shaw Colcleugh sold a collection of 218 objects, which included the Haida feast ladle, to Rudolf F. Haffenreffer Sr. (Hail, 1989).  This collection became part of the Haffenreffer’s private collection of American Indian materials in the King Philip Museum (Hail, 1989). In the analysis of how collectors acquired Indigenous objects for use in museums, particularly in the Haffenreffer museum at Brown, I can ask how methods of collecting serves as evidence of conquering and proclamations of white dominance. Through this inquiry we can begin to untangle the role of museums as a primary architect of American memory and national narrative.

  An unknowing: 

  By re-framing the American anthropology institution as a structure of colonialism, we can examine how museums function as a tool that defines whiteness and dehumanizes the non-white other. An analysis of the Haida ladle without deeper examination of Haida sovereignty, settler colonial violence, and the colonial present, is incomplete (Mullins, 2000). Thus, this Ladle transcends time. It speaks to the past of empire building yet exists still in the present moment, posing questions for colonial futurity. As it stands in the collection at the Haffenreffer Museum, it serves as a testament of Rhode Island settler colonialism, explicitly Rhode Island’s involvement in the slave trade and Indigenous genocide.
   
  This ladle was made by Haida people for serving food, to be used within the community. Somehow Colcleugh caught sight of the ladle while traveling as an collector in the Haida community and bought it out of her colonial desires. Reading survivance into the ladle serves in some ways as a keyhole that we can peer into yet cannot fully comprehend what lies on the other side. And I will never know that narrative; this is the violence of colonialism. Place-based ontology and lifeways of Indigenous peoples exist outside the context of Western anthropology altogether. How then can I provide critique as an outsider? While I can point to the suspect ways in which Emma Shaw Colcleugh took the Haida ladle out of her own (white) desires of its aesthetic qualities in the workmanship of the ladle, justice from this trauma and settler colonial violence can only come from the Haida community. The feast ladle inherently is political, a contradiction to the efforts of cultural genocide and displacement of the Haida community.

  Healing & Reclaiming knowledge:

  Acknowledging the violence associated with anthropology and its implications in Emma Shaw Colclough’s collection speak to a history of colonialism. Namely, the role of collectors in the dispossession of tribal land and sovereignty has manifested in the interpersonal removal of cultural belongings fulfilled for settler desire and entitlement over Indigenous land/life. Knowing the complete disregard for Indigenous autonomy at the time of these exchanges re-frames the collection of Indigenous objects as negotiations of survival or in many cases, where items were stolen. At the same time, it is necessary to make room for Indigenous knowledge and voices as remembrance (Lonetree, 2012). Museums serve as knowledge making enterprises that can either reinforce or combat colonial violence, and can never be neutral. Therefore, cultural revitalization and movements for Indigenous representations in museums offer possibilities of reexamining the contexts of objects and agency of Indigenous communities.
  
  So, as we think outside the anthropological paradigm, we can think of the Haida feast ladle as a witness of colonialism. Comprehending the ladle as a living object makes evident the preexisting power structures between Emma Shaw Colcleugh and the Haida people from which she bought the ladle; and how years later the ladle has been represented as a static relic of the Haida people that denies them cultural and political sovereignty. The ladle experienced violation as it was sold to Colcleugh and valued/fetishized solely for its aesthetic quality, recognized by Colcleugh as an anomaly of “primitive” life. It is still further violated by being used to objectify and define an entire group of people. And today it remains imprisoned in Bristol, shelved for most of its life and its foreseeable future at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. While Western modes of anthropology attempt to portray the Haida ladle as static, the ladle survives in the context of the museum yet is denied the dynamism of living in the present. My aim here is to write to the survivance of the Haida, and work to reclaim agency through counter-narrative storytelling. However, this does not undo the violence and continued violences at play.

  Works Cited:

  1. Colcleugh, Shaw, Emma. “In Totem Land.” Emma Shaw Colcleugh Scrapbook, Volume II 90-678b: 56-58. Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Bristol, RI.
  2. Hail, Barbara A. “" I Saw These Things": The Victorian Collection of Emma Shaw Colcleugh." Arctic Anthropology (1991): 16-33.
  3. Hail, Barbara A., and Kate C. Duncan. Out of the North: the subarctic collection of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, 1989.
  4. Krech, Shepard, ed. Passionate Hobby: Rudolf Frederick Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum. Vol. 6. Haffenreffer Museum of anthropology, 1994.
  5. Lonetree, Amy. Decolonizing museums: Representing Native America in national and tribal museums. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2012.
  6. Mullins, Paul R., and Robert Paynter. "Representing colonizers: an archaeology of creolization, ethnogenesis, and Indigenous material culture among the Haida." Historical Archaeology 34, no. 3 (2000): 73-84.