Crafted of wood, iron, plant fiber and animal sinew, the model of 10 men paddling a canoe would strike most viewers as a beautiful object. But to Haa’yuups, head of the House of Takiishtakamlthat-h of the Huupa‘chesat-h First Nation, on Vancouver Island, Canada, it also holds a mystical power. A spirit canoe, it represents the ripple of invisible oars in the water — a sound that people of his community report hearing after they have purified themselves through fasting and bathing.
When the Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History reopens to the public on May 13, after a five-year, $19 million renovation, the spirit canoe — which was not previously shown — will be one of more than 1,000 artifacts on view. Organized by Haa’yuups and Peter Whiteley, the curator of North American ethnology at the museum, the redesigned exhibit expresses the perspectives of the 10 nations whose cultures are on display: placing an emphasis on the spiritual and functional purposes of the objects for the people who made them, and incorporating testimony from community representatives about government repression of their culture.
The Northwest Coast Hall was the first gallery to open at the museum. Inaugurated in 1899 by Franz Boas, a giant of anthropology who conducted extensive field work in the Pacific Northwest, it embodied what was at the time cutting-edge thinking. At other museums, notably the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Indigenous people were regarded as “savages” who needed to be “civilized.”
In radical contrast, Boas presented non-Western artifacts as the fruits of various sophisticated civilizations. There wasn’t just one culture toward which all people were advancing. He popularized the idea of “cultural relativism,” in which societies exist as parallel universes, with beliefs and behaviors that are products of their environments. “It had a revolutionary quality,” Whiteley said. “Until then, ‘culture’ couldn’t be pluralized. Boas wanted to place people and objects in context.”
But yesterday’s revolution can come to seem retrograde. In the renovated hall, contextual labeling for the cultural artifacts has been amplified to portray the viewpoints, in the voices of Indigenous people, of the communities that made and used them. In a presentation of Haida carvings, for instance, there is a discussion of the End of Mourning Ceremony, which is held to release the spirit of the deceased a year or more after death. To this explanation is added a pungent commentary: “When missionaries arrived at our shores, they forced our Ancestors to adopt Western burial practices. Despite this, many of our traditions around death, mourning and remembrance have endured and are still practiced today.”
