“The People Shall Continue”: Native American Museums as Archives of Futurity
-
Birgit Däwes
Abstract
In the Western cultural archive from James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘noble savages’ to Gore Verbinsky’s 2013 reincarnation of The Lone Ranger, Indigenous American cultures have, for the longest time, been relegated to the past and framed in representations that either displace them into nostalgic folklore or declare them conveniently vanished. While non-Native cultural products such as literary texts, photographs, and paintings, as well as museum exhibitions have coded Indigenous identities as static opposites to modernity, and thus deprived them of a future in Western culture, contemporary Indigenous writers, artists, and curators use these same cultural channels to contest the semiotics of absence, to assert cultural sovereignty, and to empower alternative modes of knowledge. This article considers tribal museums as interventional archives of knowing – in Derrida’s sense of both “assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve” and of “consigning through gathering together signs” (1995/1996: 3; original emphasis). With examples from a Pueblo cultural context, including an exhibition at Disneyworld, Florida; the Sky City Cultural Center and Haak’u Museum in Acoma, New Mexico; as well as the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I trace the ways in which Native American museums strategically undermine what Mark Rifkin has termed “settler time” (2017: 9) and claim instead presence, sovereignty, inclusion, modernity, and futurity. In their specific outlines, these exhibits serve simultaneously as archives of Pueblo cultural heritage and as construction sites of temporality itself.1
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- What’s in an Archive? Cursory Observations and Serendipitous Reflections
- Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats
- Between Aura and Access: Artefactuality, Institutionality, and the Allure of the Archival
- The Document as Epistemic Object: Notes on Archival Knowledge Cultures
- Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive
- Words, Wares, Names: Dave the Potter as American Archive
- From Parchment to Podcast: The Collaborative Process of Building and Unlocking an Archive
- “The People Shall Continue”: Native American Museums as Archives of Futurity
- Speculative Bibliography
- Reviews
- Thijs Porck. 2019. Old Age in Early Medieval England: A Cultural History. Anglo-Saxon Studies 33. Woodbridge: Boydell, x + 278 pp., £ 60.00/$ 99.00.
- Francis Leneghan. 2020. The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf. Anglo-Saxon Studies 39. Cambridge: Brewer, xxi + 300 pp., 1 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Irina Dumitrescu and Eric Weiskott (eds.). 2019. The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 51. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, xix + 281 pp., $ 109.99.
- Mary Clayton and Juliet Mullins (eds. and trans.). 2019. Ælfric: Old English Lives of Saints. Volumes I-III. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 58–60. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, vol. I: xxxii + 384 pp.; vol. II: vi + 426 pp.; vol. III: vi + 402 pp., each volume $ 35.00/£ 28.95/€ 31.00.
- Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz and Sabine Sielke (eds.). 2016. Knowledge Landscapes North America. Heidelberg: Winter, 305 pp., € 58.00.
- T. R. Johnson (ed.). 2019. New Orleans: A Literary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 379 pp., £ 35.00.
- Christian B. Long. 2017. The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960–2000. Bristol/Chicago, IL: Intellect, 300 pp., £ 70.00.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- What’s in an Archive? Cursory Observations and Serendipitous Reflections
- Archive Fever and British Romanticism: Blake, Byron, and Keats
- Between Aura and Access: Artefactuality, Institutionality, and the Allure of the Archival
- The Document as Epistemic Object: Notes on Archival Knowledge Cultures
- Of Gaps and Gossip: Intimacy in the Archive
- Words, Wares, Names: Dave the Potter as American Archive
- From Parchment to Podcast: The Collaborative Process of Building and Unlocking an Archive
- “The People Shall Continue”: Native American Museums as Archives of Futurity
- Speculative Bibliography
- Reviews
- Thijs Porck. 2019. Old Age in Early Medieval England: A Cultural History. Anglo-Saxon Studies 33. Woodbridge: Boydell, x + 278 pp., £ 60.00/$ 99.00.
- Francis Leneghan. 2020. The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf. Anglo-Saxon Studies 39. Cambridge: Brewer, xxi + 300 pp., 1 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Irina Dumitrescu and Eric Weiskott (eds.). 2019. The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 51. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, xix + 281 pp., $ 109.99.
- Mary Clayton and Juliet Mullins (eds. and trans.). 2019. Ælfric: Old English Lives of Saints. Volumes I-III. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 58–60. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, vol. I: xxxii + 384 pp.; vol. II: vi + 426 pp.; vol. III: vi + 402 pp., each volume $ 35.00/£ 28.95/€ 31.00.
- Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz and Sabine Sielke (eds.). 2016. Knowledge Landscapes North America. Heidelberg: Winter, 305 pp., € 58.00.
- T. R. Johnson (ed.). 2019. New Orleans: A Literary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 379 pp., £ 35.00.
- Christian B. Long. 2017. The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960–2000. Bristol/Chicago, IL: Intellect, 300 pp., £ 70.00.
