The Way of the Masks

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2022

The way of the masks

On the newly redone Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History.

The museum of today dislikes the museum of yesterday. That’s clear enough as the buildings, the collections, and the curators of the past are branded suspect and even denounced by the leadership of the present. Nowhere has this been more evident than at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. For years the institution has been on an apology tour for America and its relationship to nature and history, all the while turning the museum into a vitrine of virtue-signaling politics. Artifacts from its Hall of South American Peoples, such as the shrunken heads of the Shuar Indians of Ecuador, have been effaced from view. A diorama of “Old New York” depicting trade between the Dutch settlers and Lenape tribesmen has been graffitied over with content warnings. (“The scene offers only stereotypical representations and ignores how complex and violent colonization was for Native people.”) At the same time the museum has shown increasing contempt for its visitors, who must now queue outside for an hour or longer just to pass through a phalanx of security- and covid-theater.

Early this year this progressive onslaught reached a fever pitch as the institution jackhammered up the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt from the museum’s memorial rotunda that bears his name. This work by James Earle Fraser, based on Verrocchio’s grand equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, had been an integral part of John Russell Pope’s original 1928 museum design (see “A classical illness” in The New Criterion of September 2020). I am still astonished the museum went through with this act of vandalism, which was an affront to the city, not to mention an insult to our twenty-sixth president. The museum has now deprived future generations of its own history as embodied in its art and architecture. It has also shown itself to be at the beck and call of the woke mob, when even those artifacts bolted to the pavement are no longer safe from erasure. As Ellen Futter, the museum’s director of the past three decades, has just announced her retirement, one can only hope that the censorious managerial class she represents will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Against the backdrop of our own tribal politics, the study of culture, in which the American Museum of Natural History was once an unapologetic leader, can still come as particular relief. Even as it now eats itself, the institution, in its founding mission, was an ark for the world’s traditional cultures at a moment when many of them were under threat or vanishing. At no time was this more evident than under the guidance of the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942). Over a century ago the museum through his work preserved the customs and artifacts of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest in astonishing ways that continue to enrich us today. This preservation has been especially valuable as those tribes under Canadian jurisdiction faced a government that outlawed their rituals and destroyed their artifacts as a matter of policy for nearly a century. In 1899 Boas’s Northwest Coast Hall opened in the museum’s first wing. Today it remains the oldest exhibit on view, and in its original location. Now after a five-year renovation, the hall has reopened. The results should still remind us of the genius of Northwest Coast culture and the achievements of Boas and his colleagues in preserving it. At the same time the renovation signals troubling new directions for anthropological display.

The old Northwest Coast Hall. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The ten nations that make up the Northwest Coast tribes—Tlingit, Haida, Nisga’a, Gitxsan, Tsimshian, Haíltzaqv, Nuxalk, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-cha-nulth, and Salish—at one time enjoyed an abundance of natural resources that allowed for the development of a richly artistic and performative culture. This abundance was celebrated through the “potlatch,” an elaborate social pageant where rank and status were conferred through the ritual sacrifice of some of these resources. As a field researcher in British Columbia, Boas did not just amass the tribal artifacts of the peoples living there. He also studied their tribal customs, in particular those around the potlatch. Working with George Hunt, an English-Tlingit guide married to a Kwakwaka’wakw native, in 1897 Boas published The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, an extensive monograph that recorded their ceremonies, songs, and language in relation to their artistic materials—in particular the transforming, animistic wooden masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw.

A map of the Northwest Coast tribes. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The complexities of these native practices, especially the ritual destruction of resources, were used as justification by the Canadian government for banning the potlatch and subsequently confiscating and destroying their artifacts, through laws that were in effect from 1884 to 1951. While motivated by the “best practices” of the age, which sought to assimilate native populations into Canadian culture, these statutes were an injustice that proved to be catastrophic for native art and custom.

It was the great ingenuity of Boas to work around Canada’s potlatch ban and complete his research. Rather than continue his field research in Canada, he arranged for Hunt and his extended family to live for seven months in 1893 in an ethnographic display as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he could study the Kwakwaka’wakw outside of Canadian jurisdiction.

When Boas’s hall opened in 1899, he carried through his deep understanding of Pacific Coast cultures while respecting their tribal specificity. Thanks to his extensive field research, he was able to exhibit their artifacts on their own terms, in separate alcoves dividing the hall that were dedicated to each nation and its social practices.

By today’s standards, Boas’s tenure at the museum was not without fault. A family of Greenland Inuits lived and died in his care at the museum in 1897. After staging a mock funeral for the benefit of the one boy, Minik Wallace, who survived, Boas in fact dissected his father’s body and placed it in the museum’s collection. Wallace dedicated his life to the return of these desecrated remains.

Boas’s approach to tribal research nevertheless revolutionized his field as he went on to found the department of anthropology at Columbia University. Zora Neale Hurston, a disciple of Boas at Barnard, applied his groundbreaking methodology to preserving the folkways of the black South. The structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss likewise credited Boas with inspiring his own methodology in the 1940s, leading to his 1975 book The Way of the Masks.

In some aspects of the new Northwest Coast Hall, the legacy of Boas can still be felt. The tribal alcoves have been roughly retained. The Haida dugout canoe known as the “Great Canoe,” which for decades resided in the museum’s Seventy-seventh Street entrance, has been restored to the center of the hall where it appeared when the room first opened. Extensive labels also now accompany the restored artifacts, with some one thousand objects now on display. In the Kwakwaka’wakw section, for example, these labels describe and explain the fool masks of the red-cedar-bark ceremonies and the transformation masks of the myth of Siwidi, an ancestor taken by a giant octopus to an undersea kingdom who returns transformed as a sequence of sea animals.

The “Great Canoe” in the Northwest Coast Hall. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The problem with the new hall, and it is a big one, is in its curatorial voice. Some ten contemporary tribal members are listed here as co- and consulting curators. The results come off as exhibition by committee and anthropology as memoir. The wall labels are almost all presented in the first person. The distinctions between science and myth, subject and object, are nowhere maintained. “The Haíltzaqv people have lived on the central coast of British Columbia in and around Wáglísla (Bella Bella) since time began,” reads one wall text. “The case lighting has been darkened at the request of Tlingit advisors to reflect the cultural sensitivity of these items,” reads another.

The leadership at the museum is now so beholden to contemporary First Nations, or at least makes such a show of being beholden to them, that the presentation drowns out the very objects of history meant for display. “We need to talk about racism!” exclaims one introductory wall label in an extra-large font. “Systemic racism has been present here since first contact with white people and persisted to this current moment and this conversation,” goes the welcome video on repeat loop. On another wall, under the label “Support native art—made by Native artists,” we are given examples of decorated skateboards, sneakers, and basketballs.

For all of the verbiage now packed into this one hall—aimed at best obliquely at the museumgoer new to this cultural content—certain names and stories are notably absent. Gone is the remarkable history surrounding the transportation of that sixty-three-foot Great Canoe, the largest dugout canoe in existence, which until recently was included with its display. Created around 1878 from a single piece of Western red cedar, the canoe was acquired by the museum and moved by steamer to the isthmus of Panama, where it was transported by rail to the Atlantic, then shipped to a Manhattan pier, then moved to the new museum by horse-drawn wagon.

Also absent is the story of Franz Boas himself. You might think that if you are telling a story of the survival of culture, you would include the role of the curator who saved it. It is unfortunate that today’s anthropology museum must scrub itself clean of its own fingerprints to create the illusion of native curatorial control. A display dedicated to the history of the hall would make for a genuinely revelatory introduction.

Instead we now learn almost exclusively of the museum’s historical mistakes. “An anthropologist working for the Museum recorded scant information about this carved house post when it was taken in 1909 from Haida territory in Alaska,” says one label. “Beginning in the latter half of the 1800s, anthropologists and other unsanctioned ‘collectors’ took the belongings and stole the actual bones of our Ancestors,” reads another. The only place Boas now appears, at least that I could find, is in the display of his remarkable 1896 model of the Kwakwaka’wakw village of Xwamdasbe’—“the earliest model of its kind still in existence,” reads the label. The text then proceeds to point out the model’s elisions and inaccuracies.

Today’s Northwest Coast Hall dwells in the present at the expense of the past. Lost finally in this modern-day political potlatch is a spirit of appreciation for the ancestors of anthropology. This is a sin of omission that rests on today’s museum leadership and its misleadingly selective use of native voices, not on these voices themselves.

Five years ago, Garfield George, the head of the Raven Beaver House of Angoon, Tlingit, accompanied at the podium by his young daughter, Violet Murphy-George, gave a dedication at the museum that deserves to be remembered. Since these words appear nowhere in the new hall, I reproduce them here:

In 1882 they set our canoes on fire, set our village on fire. Our food caches. But the canoe prow was taken care of by this great institution. It was one of the only canoes to survive the bombardment and was used to gather food. Gather materials. It was the canoe that saved us. Someone asked me recently if it is hard to see these objects in this museum. The answer is yes, it is, but it survived.

Today’s Northwest Coast Hall is a testament to all of those who worked for this survival—acknowledged and otherwise.

New Worlds

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2021

New worlds

On a discovery of fifteenth-century Venetian glass beads in Alaska.

Venice can be a furnace, as anyone who visits in midsummer will tell you. Beyond the heat of the Adriatic sun, the lagoon city is also a furnace for culture. This is why we still visit: to experience those ingredients of East and West, of Rome and Byzantium, of Europe and Asia and past and present, that melted together and crystallized through art and architecture into islands of faith and fortune.

Out of that heat came many miracles. In the fifteenth century, Venice’s glass factories on the lagoon island of Murano produced a particular miracle that has only now come to light. One day, over five hundred years ago, a guild of Murano glassmakers combined a mixture of silica, plant ash, lime, cobalt, and copper. They fueled their furnace with alder and willow wood. They added their grains of silica made from the sands of Crete and Sicily and the quartz of the local Ticino and Adige rivers. Turned malleable through the ash, strengthened by the lime, the silica melted into molten glass that was lustrously colored like a milky blue cloud, the result of the material’s exposure in heat to the cobalt and copper. The glassmakers then extracted the mixture. They stretched it into a thin cane, or drawn tube, until it was no more than half an inch thick. Then they cut the tube into tiny segments and reheated the pieces in a special rotating furnace. This final process smoothed over the edges, until the glass cuttings became polished and round.

What emerged that day were translucent cerulean globes of a dreamy, oceanic radiance. Then as now they were the coveted creation of that particular Venetian genius for melding art and technology into objects that are unlike anything else in the world. Bisected with tiny holes, the beads were designed to be tied together. Little did the glassmakers of Murano know quite how far those ties would take them.

The glassmaking guilds of Venice developed their proprietary techniques for manufacturing rosary beads—paternostri—of extraordinary beauty. In the markets to the east, beyond Renaissance Christendom, these same glass beads became prized as veriselli—imitation gemstones. Two centuries before, the Venetian Marco Polo had famously opened up the worlds of Asia, returning with paper and stories of the Silk Road. Now it was the glass of Venice, an alchemy of art and artifice, that was making its way to the Orient.

Out of the furnaces of Venice, those blue beads ended up traveling farther than even Marco Polo could have imagined. In the months and years after their creation, a handful of the beads followed the Silk Road routes to the east. Down the Adriatic and around the horn of Greece, past the Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas, the beads moved hand over hand into China. Then to the north and east, they passed into aboriginal Asian territories. Eventually they reached the tribal lands along the northern Pacific. Now at the western edge of the Bering Sea, at the outer edge of Asia, the beads went again by boat. This time they were traded along indigenous fishing routes. Now in the hands of prehistoric Eskimos, they crossed the Bering Strait, a journey of over fifty miles by kayak—remarkably, into present-day Alaska.

It wasn’t until 1741 that Vitus Bering, a Danish cartographer in the service of Russian explorers, first made contact with the native peoples of southern Alaska. The sea and strait dividing the Asian and North American continents are named in his honor, and his discoveries ended the region’s prehistoric period by opening the door for Russian traders. The Murano beads, entering North America sometime in the 1400s, predate the arrival of European contact there by centuries.

Venetian beads found in northern Alaska. Image: Kunz & Mills / American Antiquity.

Following native trade routes along the Noatak River, Eskimos carried these beads up from the Chukchi Sea and the Kotzebue Sound. Eventually they reached the crest of the Continental Divide at a place called Punyik Point, a site in the Arctic tundra along the north shore of Etivlik Lake suited for caribou hunting and trout fishing. Here along the western Brooks Range, the Colville River begins its Arctic journey among the shrub-willow patches to the Beaufort Sea to the north east.

Judging by their well-worn appearance, the Venetian beads were prized, rubbed, and held close. The Eskimos likely divided them, now tied with local twine and mixed in with cold-hammered copper jewelry of native manufacture, among a family clan living in different temporary dwellings. One day, they hid the beads along with their local jewelry behind the benches and in the entry tunnels of the temporary winter shelters they had dug into the earth. Then, for reasons we can only imagine for a nomadic people who left no written record, they departed and never returned for their unique possessions. Maybe there was a catastrophe. Maybe they were simply unable to retrieve them. Over the seasons, as the shelters collapsed back into the earth, the beads came to rest among the caribou bones. They were only rediscovered and identified over five centuries on, matching beads found at two other Arctic sites, all connected by the drainages of nearby rivers.

When the archaeologists Michael L. Kunz and Robin O. Mills announced the finding of these Venetian beads in February 2021 in the journal American Antiquity—the result of decades of research and field investigation at three archaeological sites—they speculated that the objects were among the earliest evidence of European culture in the Americas. Through radio-carbon dating of the locally sourced twine discovered among the neighboring jewelry, and what is otherwise now known about the nomadic dwellings in which they were found, they concluded that the beads most likely arrived in their resting place sometime in the middle of the 1400s. The two archaeologists called their discovery the “first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent.” That means the beads entered the North American continent many decades before Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies in 1492—an event that also brought Venetian beads to the New World.

It took a leap of faith for those beads to cross the ten-thousand-mile route from the Venetian lagoon to Punyik Point. It also took a leap and many years of research for archaeologists, digging for over half a century around the outlines of what remained of those small nomadic dwellings, to realize quite what they had found. Yet seeing those beads today, as extraordinary as it now seems, it is still possible for us to understand the dynamics that delivered them over such vast distances to be traded among such disparate peoples.

We speak too little of beauty. Yet, time and again, the wealth of culture, and the creativity to embed that culture into things of beauty, has the power to surprise. In the affections of art, of music and dance, even of captivating ideas, humanity extends its reach against the odds. Beauty can draw the lines of culture over vast distances, making the most unexpected connections. It can also be all that remains, not just of value, but of values, long outlasting the people who created, conveyed, and protected it. If only we would recognize culture qua culture, as something to be prized for its richness and coveted for its complexities outside of the diktats of the present moment.

There was a time, even in the lifetime of many readers today, when the arrival of European culture in the Americas was considered a cause for celebration. Perhaps this celebration was too unalloyed and too unchallenged, but American civic identity has long recognized the events around it as world-defining, on the order of the first humans stepping out of Africa, and not unreasonably so. In another time, the discovery of the Venetian beads of Punyik Point might have been heralded along the lines of Columbus’s first landfall, or the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. Beyond Viking outposts in Greenland and Newfoundland, which might date to 1000 A.D., everything that European civilization has touched in the Americas started at Punyik Point, with tiny glass beads seeding the crest of the Continental Divide. The story invites wonder, not at conquest, but at culture and its astonishing powers to connect worlds we otherwise insist are unconnected.

We live at a moment when the historical overlay of European culture onto the Americas has never seemed more tenuous. The regular attacks on its symbols and rituals now feel like concerted acts of extirpation, with energies that seem to burn for nothing less than the annihilation of Western culture down to the roots of the American soil. The culture of the West has not always been here, the arguments go. It is alien, compromised, bringing with it a set of foreign ideals that have not nearly been met. Native peoples have also lived in the Americas for thousands of years—if not since the beginning of time, as oral traditions may teach, then at least for longer than anyone can remember, through the ice age, through periods when even the landscape looked quite different and the continents of America and Asia may have been connected. And these critics are right, at least about the West’s relatively brief presence in the Americas. Six hundred years is but a moment compared to six thousand years, or thirty thousand years.

The discovery of the Venetian beads should, in fact, remind us of this impermanence. It is precisely this impermanence, the bead-like preciousness of culture, that needs care and protection. Western culture often exists as an intervention—a cultivated garden, a voice in the wilderness, a remote settlement. Some of its most lasting moments have been on the margins, where cultures are set in relief and the divisions between settled and unsettled are most deeply felt. Western culture can be best expressed in these extended, exploratory, colonizing forms—as refugees from the Trojan War setting foot on the coast of Italy, or American astronauts touching down on the lunar surface, or Venetian beads adorning a family of Eskimos. This is why the culture of the Americas has been so remarkable in its heterogeneous, modern form. Those Venetian beads signaled the beginning of a moment that has enriched the world of culture.

The discovery of the Venetian beads should also suggest the true complexity of that exchange. Western culture arrived here as an interchange, an import to the Americas as much as an export of Europe. If only we would recognize and protect that culture today as well as its Asian and Mesoamerican custodians did half a millennium ago. The five-hundred-plus-year history of European contact in the Americas may be a blink of the eye, but consider what has been achieved in that short time. No matter how it may end, consider also that the future of the Americas will be buried together—
Native and European jewels mixed among the caribou bones.

For the prehistoric people of northwest Alaska, even if they could not have imagined the Basilica of San Marco with its celestial domes, they knew they had something remarkable in their tiny globes of sky, crystallized in Mediterranean sand. The same goes for the unimaginable chain of hands that connected these people through those beads, from the Arctic tundra of Punyik Point all the way back to the Murano glass guilds of fifteenth-century Venice.