Beyond the Galleries

The Case of the Fuzzy Cases

ColavecchioS — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000

The Case of the Fuzzy Cases

From Issue: Fall 2025 / Vol. 26 No. 3

by Anne Bolen

When the day began in December 2015, it was going to be fairly routine for members of the conservation and exhibition staff at the National Museum of the American Indian. They were cleaning some display cases in the “Infinity of Nations” exhibition, which had been at the museum in New York since 2010. Within its vast cases that stretch the length two rooms are a cornucopia of nearly 650 items from Indigenous cultures in North, Central and South America, and they were preparing to rotate out a few items so they could add new ones from the NMAI collection. But then someone installing items spotted something unusual and asked what seemed like a simple question: “What is that?”

The “Infinity of Nations” exhibition at the NMAI in New York features items from across the Western Hemisphere.

Photo by NMAI staff

This double-spout ceramic drinking vessel in the shape of two fruits from Peru was the first item in the exhibition discovered to have crystals growing on it (above). These were successfully removed (below).

Drinking vessel, Nazca; (A.D. 100–450), 1944; cotton canvas, wood and casein paint; 4" x 2" x 5". 17/8902

Photo by NMAI staff

Feathers such as these on this shirt’s shoulders can easily catch small particles of dirt and are some of the most challenging materials to clean.

Mans shirt from Crazy Horse (Oglala Lakota); circa 1875; hide, hair, feathers and paint; 33.5" x 55". 16/1351

Photo by NMAI staff

Yet because feathers have barbs, using a feather attached to a straw can clean feathers and other delicate materials.

Photo by NMAI staff

Erin Birdsall shines the flashlight from her cellphone onto feathers on a mask collected in Brazil so she and Susan Heald (right) can look for any glittering crystals.

Mask, Karaja ijaso; 1930-1960; reed, feathers and gourd; 67" x 21" x 8.6". 23/2000

Photo by NMAI staff

On a shelf near the far top left corner of the display case was a ceramic Nazca drinking vessel from Peru dating to more than 1,500 years ago. It’s two mouth pieces looked initially to be covered in dust, but upon bringing the jar down from its perch, the mysterious particles looked fuzzy. Some of the white fluffy substance tumbled off the jar like freshly fallen snowflakes, yet they felt waxy. The staff was stunned. The case had not been open recently, and all the pieces were clean when they were put on display. Only after examining it closely under a bright light could they see the “fuzz” was actually clumps of glittering crystals. “It sparkled, like the vampires in the Twilight movies,” said NMAI’s Head of Conservation Susan Heald.

Museums are constantly battling virtually silent and invisible nemeses. The first is time. Even though all objects are kept under strict temperature controls in drawers, some natural materials such as leather eventually lose their elasticity and are vulnerable to degradation. In museums’ early days, collections were often treated with naphthalene (moth balls) to keep away unwanted pests, which leaves an unpleasant odor that can last for decades. Ledgers of the collector George Gustav Heye, who in 1916 founded the Museum of the American Indian-Heye Foundation that preceded the NMAI, showed “he would buy 200 to 600 pounds of naphthalene moth flakes a year,” said Heald.

Rather than using chemicals, today the NMAI museums in New York and Washington, D.C., as well as NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center in Maryland that houses the more than 800,000 items in the NMAI collection are constantly being cleaned to remove any danger of attracting moths or carpet beetles that can break materials down. But this sparkly invader was something entirely new to NMAI.

Still, Heald had a suspicion of what it was. Just weeks earlier, she had read an abstract of an article describing this phenomenon: “efflorescence crystals” were found growing on rubber sealing gaskets, interior glass doors and items within display cases at several other museums in the United States and other countries. To confirm the identity of the substance, the staff took a sample and sent it to Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute (MCI), which verified this was indeed what they were seeing.

Ironically, the very cases built to protect the items within were the culprits. Between 2009 and 2014, some case manufacturers used automotive adhesive to bind glass together in its display cases. Because the cases were air-tight to block pests or other destructive elements, they had no ventilation. In the closed environment, the adhesive began to off-gas a volatile organic compound, a toxin that can irritate eyes, throats and skin while encouraging the crystals to grow.

Yet replacing these enormous, heavy cases on the second floor of the old building without a freight elevator would have been a Herculean task that would have cost millions. “They are beautiful, high-quality cases. They just have this unfortunate adhesive that isn’t being used anymore,” said Heald.

The only option was to find ways to remove the crystals within them. In 2020, they received some funding to gather a team to search every case and document where the crystals were. But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the museum was shut down for months. So NMAI Collections Manager John George and intern Sarah Elston took on the job of surveying the exhibition.

The team found that, unlike in other museums, the crystals were not on gaskets inside the cases but rather on about a third of the objects in the exhibition—with no obvious pattern. The crystals were not picky: they grew on ceramic, stone, wood, feathers, furs, textiles, tanned hides, plant fibers and seeds. They tended to prefer more ancient items but were also thriving on historic and contemporary pieces. The only common factor seemed to be that at some point many of the items with crystals must have been touched or used by humans, leaving oil or sweat residues behind. George said, “Crystals are forming on top of that presence of that original person. Blood, sweat and tears go into these pieces, and this is where you can visibly see it.”

The problem was perplexing. Staff endeavored to completely clean the cases and the objects within and air the cases out to prevent the crystals from regrowing, but “soon as you shut the case, it built up again,” said Heald.

In 2022, the museum and the MCI received additional funding from Smithsonian’s National Collections Program (NCP) that enabled conservation staff to travel to New York to inspect and investigate ways to clean the items and keep them on display. But removing the crystals without damaging very old and delicate materials such as cedar bark, feathers or cotton fabric hundreds of years old was no easy task. They ended up fashioning some creative tools.

Donning gloves, goggles and other protective gear to not be affected by the toxic crystals, the team got to work. They would use a rubber band or hair tie to attach a piece of fabric over a vacuum cleaner nozzle so they could suck up dust and crystals yet not any tiny pieces of items within the cases. Soft, slightly damp cosmetic sponges and swabs helped remove remaining residue from hard surfaces such as a wood mask or a ceramic pot. However, cleaning feathers or fragile, painted fibers was a whole other challenge. “Cleaning the feathers is so hard,” said Heald. But because feathers have barbed hooks, they also are the perfect tool to pick up and trap tiny particles such as dirt on other feathers.

Heald found what she needed in Manhattan’s garment district. A colleague at the American Museum of Natural History had told her they had been using feathers to clean delicate items. “I went to the store that only sells feathers and asked for a particular feather. They have to be white and soft, like a swan feather, so we can see any dirt,” Heald explained. She ended up buying four different types of feathers and attaching them to paper, cocktail and coffee straws to make feather brushes that could be used to painstakingly clean fragile materials. “Some things like a small stone might take 15 minutes to clean,” said Heald “but there is a skirt made of condor feathers, for example, that took two of us a day and a half.”

Once they are done for the day, staff wipe surfaces down with a water and alcohol solution. Altogether, the many cleaning methods have significantly reduced the number of crystals.

The funding also enabled them to tap into the skills of a post-doctoral chemistry student, Erin Birdsall. As a NMAI and MCI fellow until June 2025, she was tasked to analyze the crystals as well as the success of the cleaning methods. She was continuing the work of Alba Álvarez-Martín, then a post-doctoral conservation science fellow at MCI. Now Birdsall continues to work on the project as needed as a MCI fellow and heritage scientist.

To determine whether the adhesive was off-gasing in a case, she needed to test the air quality inside. Each chemical has a known weight and mass. Birdsall used a mass spectrometer to identify the toxic compound in cases throughout the exhibition.

The team decided the only solution to preventing the crystals from growing would be to constantly filter and circulate the air in the cases. They tried several filtration units and setups before landing on a type of filtration unit with a fan. The large cases had some space beneath their bottom deck where the units could sit and a thin gap between the glass and deck that would allow air to circulate. Others had to be retrofitted to find a place for the air filtering units and add electricity to run them.

Once an item had been cleaned, the NMAI staff still needed a simple way to verify that all the crystals had been removed before putting it back in a case. They discovered that shining the flashlight from a cell phone onto an item would cause its crystals to sparkle, revealing their location. To test cleaning methods, Birdsall used solid phase microextraction. This involved placing a tiny fiber resembling a piece of pencil lead on a surface and then running it through a gas mass spectrometer that, through extremely hot gas, breaks down any materials on it into separate chemicals. If this showed the components of the crystals, then some remained; otherwise the item was clear.

Heald was grateful that Birdsall was on the team. “Having a chemist was critical to solving the problem,” she said.

Because the crystals were growing on all different types of materials, Birdsall said “we expected them to all be slightly different, like different flavors for each material, but they are all the same, which was crazy.” So Birdsall is still trying to determine the exact chemical reaction that cause these crystals to grow.

Since the installation of the air filtration systems, however, the crystals have yet to return. Although the NCP funding has ended, NMAI and MCI staff continue monitoring the cases and will replace the air filters as needed. In 2026, the conservation and exhibition staff will finally be able to add new items to the exhibition again. As they were working in the exhibition space, visitors could watch and ask questions. “Showing the public how we are solving this problem was very positive,” George said.

Members of the team have published journal articles about their investigations and shared their approach to cleaning the items and cases with other museums around the world, including some others at Smithsonian that have had some crystallization issues. “It has been a learning experience to see how we are all tackling this together,” he said, “but I think we are leading the way.”

The team is also aiming to put together some care guidelines for Indigenous communities so they can be aware of the situation and the remedies the museum staff developed to care for their belongings. Birdsall said, “We want to make sure these items are as safe as possible and that we are handing them off in the best possible condition.”

Heald said, “After 10 years, we are moving forward. We can do item rotations and returns to communities safely. We’ve had an incredible journey, with many walking with us along the way.”

Authors

Anne Bolen

Anne Bolen is executive editor of American Indian magazine.

Solving Museum Mysteries: NMAI is Delving Into its Vast Collection to Rediscover Hidden Pasts

ThorneLE — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 22:00:00 +0000

Beyond the Galleries

Solving Museum Mysteries: NMAI is Delving Into its Vast Collection to Rediscover Hidden Pasts

From Issue: Winter 2023 / Vol. 24 No. 4

by Maria Galban

Searching through the National Museum of the American Indian records, I stared at a single receipt from Paris dated 1927 that simply said “vase.” I set the small slip of paper aside and thought, “I’ll never figure out which vessel that is.”

Yet 13 years later, I finally discovered the answer to this and many more mysteries hidden within the museum’s collection. That receipt was among the hundreds of thousands of documents, journal entries, photos and handwritten notes that have been matched with their corresponding items through an intense, multiyear effort.

Restoring Hidden Histories

An item’s journey doesn’t end when it is brought through a museum’s doors. It continues with its life through research studies, exhibitions and, in some cases, its return home to its community. The Retro Accession Lot Project has retraced items’ lives through whose hands they passed, from those of their original Indigenous creators and owners to those of collectors, dealers and anthropologists. This enormous undertaking of bringing clues together has revealed hidden stories that are providing depth and reconnection to objects previously thought lost to time.

For example, entertainer Dick Cavett donated the funds for the Museum of the American Indian to purchase this Mexican statue in 1972.

Figure, Teotihuacán, Mexico, A.D. 100–350; modeled, polished and appliquéd ceramic; 7.75”x 5.25”. 24/6989

Photo by NMAI Staff

Tlingit Tunic

This Chilkat tunic was simply described as a purchase in the NMAI catalog. But a 1949 letter to Heye from the Alaska Fur Company described a “ceremonial robe about 100 years old, once owned by the famous Chief Donnawak” for sale. A search through the NMAI collection database yielded a match with this red tunic acquired around that time. This correspondence provided us with the name of not only the seller but also the previous owner (actually spelled Doniwak), a chief of the Chilkat Tlingit in Alaska. An object with no known history was suddenly reconnected to its Indigenous owner. Prior to this discovery, it had been displayed as the tunic of a high-ranking woman.

Tunic, Tlingit, Alaska, circa 1900; red wool, cotton and glass beads; 47.5” x 65”. 21/3784

Photo by NMAI Staff

This 1949 letter to George Heye from the Alaska Fur Company provided us with the name of not only the seller but also the previous owner of the red tunic in the previous photo.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Seminole Men’s Leggings

Mark R. Harrington worked for George Heye and later the Museum of the American Indian from 1908 to 1928, traveling throughout the United States to collect items from Indigenous communities. In 1908, he visited Florida, where he purchased these rare Seminole men’s leggings. Fortunately, Harrington kept detailed field notes about objects he collected, including the names of the individuals from whom he purchased, the prices he paid and the Indigenous language term for objects. Harrington purchased these leggings from a Seminole man named Mister Dennis (Icokocokni or Ch-To-Go-la-Gee). Before finding this information in Harrington’s field journal, it was missing from the NMAI catalog.

Men’s leggings, Seminole, Florida, circa 1900; leather; 26” x 12 ”. 1/8208

Photo by NMAI Staff

In the NMAI archives was this photo of the leggings’ original owner, Dennis (left), and fellow Seminole Tribe of Florida member Tommy Jumpen, which was taken about 1896.

Photo by Charles Barney Cory Sr., NMAI Archives; P29045

Guanacaste-Nicoya Ceramic Pot

The receipt from a Paris shop that merely listed a purchase as a “Vase” would lead to the discovery of where a Guanacaste-Nicoya pot in the collection came from. After years of looking through the MAI records, the Paris auction houses that Heye visited and the type of objects he usually purchased on his frequent trips became known. The date on the receipt, 1927, was cross-referenced in the NMAI collection with pre-Hispanic ceramic objects that may he have been acquired around that time. Then an image of the pot was found in a Paris auction catalog from the same date that said it was from Costa Rica. Now we know how MAI acquired this pot and have a starting point for further provenance research of this object.

Tripod vessel, Guanacaste-Nicoya, Costa Rica, A.D. 800-1350; pottery and paint; 12.5” x 7”. 15/8688

Photo by NMAI Staff

A Paris shop receipt led to uncovering the auction at which the vessel had been sold.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Absentee Shawnee Deer-Skin Coat

Harrington collected this coat in Oklahoma during his 1910 expedition. He kept detailed notes about the objects he collected, including the names of the individuals from whom he purchased items. He also often took photographs documenting how items were worn or used. After pouring through his notes and photographs, more than 100 years later the coat has been reconnected to its Indigenous owner. One of Harrington’s photographs (right) shows Joe Billy, chief of the Big Jim Band of Absentee Shawnee of Oklahoma, wearing the same coat that is now housed in the NMAI collection.

Absentee Shawnee, Oklahoma, 1910; leather and beads; 36”x 22”. 2/7607

Photo by NMAI Staff

Joe Billy (Pem Mep To), chief of the Big Jim Band of Absentee Shawnee), wearing the same coat in the NMAI collection. NO2868

Photo by Mark R. Harrington; NMAI Archives

Passamaquoddy Signed Birchbark Box

This birchbark box elaborately engraved with scenes of running figures and flowers was created by Passamaquoddy artist Tomah Joseph during the early 1900s. Joseph’s signature runs up the side of the box yet it was cataloged in the MAI by the name of collector Helen Pep Grodka. Her daughter and son-in-law donated the box to the museum after her death in 1982, but how Grodka acquired it was unclear. The original catalog description of the box was finally located in the MAI archives. It noted that she purchased it in 1970 from collectors Luther D. and Virginia Enoch Lovekin from Pennsylvania. These collectors had not appeared in the NMAI archives before. This new information makes tracing who else once owned this box possible.

Birchbark Box, Passamaquoddy, 1837–1914, Maine, circa 1900; birchbark, woodsplints and dye; 4” x 2.5”x 3”. 25/1662

Photo by NMAI Staff

Wendot (Huron) Pipe Bowl

During the 1940s, the MAI hit hard times after two wealthy benefactors died. The museum began to sell board-approved “duplicate” items from the collection to raise money for the purchase of other items. Receipts and correspondences helped uncover the sources of these objects, which were usually purchases from individuals. This process revealed that this pipe bowl, which depicts a face and two figures holding a whiskey barrel, was purchased in 1949 from Patty Frank, a collector in Germany who once worked for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Frank donated items to help found the Karl May Museum in Radebeul, Germany.

Pipe bowl, Wendot (Huron), Canada, circa 1800; catlinite; 5.5”x 2.7”. 21/3037

Photo by NMAI Staff

Dakota Honor Feather

Dakota present eagle feathers such as this to honor someone’s actions. It was another item simply described as a “purchase.” However, documentation located at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Library revealed that it once belonged to Dakota tribal member Artemas Ehnamani. During the Dakota war of 1862, Ehnamani was imprisoned in Davenport, Iowa, for opposing his peoples’ removal from Minnesota. He was sentenced to death, but President Lincoln ultimately pardoned him. He later became a Presbyterian minister in Santee, Nebraska. MAI purchased the feather in 1925 from Mary B. Riggs, whose husband, Alfred, ran the Santee Normal Training School, a mission school for Santee Sioux children.

Honor feather, Dakota, Nebraska, 1825–1902; eagle feathers and porcupine quills. 14.5”x 2.5”. 13/7828

Photo by NMAI Staff

Lakota Horse Blanket

Lewis Hotchkiss Brittin was a collector of books and Native American art as well as the founder of Northwest Airlines. Heye purchased his collection in 1906. Found in the archives was a set of collector cards referencing the name Thomas F. Burnett, but no such individual was associated with the museum’s collection. After digging deeper and comparing objects, we discovered these cards were actually from Brittin and the name Burnett was erroneous. The cards included early images of the objects and notes about how Brittin obtained them, including this Lakota saddle blanket, which he bought from the Hyde Exploring Expedition, a trading company that operated stores in New Mexico and New York City from 1899 to 1903.

Saddle blanket, Lakota, South Dakota, circa 1890; hide, glass beads, sinew, brass bells and cotton thread; 72” x 2 5”. 0/8530

Photo by NMAI Staff

K’iche’ Maya Mask

In 1928, archaeologist Samuel Lothrop went on a trip to Guatemala where he collected K’iche’ Maya (Quiché) masks and outfits used in traditional dances. The orginal owners of these objects had been unknown. However, one of Lothrop’s journals found in the Peabody Museum Archives at Harvard revealed he met with Miguel Chuc, a well-known K’iche’ Maya mask maker, from whom he purchased them.

“Then we went to the house of Miguel Chuc, the maker of masks. … His father, grandfather, have all been makers of masks. … He led us through a series of no less than 10 dusky rooms lined with shelves and piled ceiling high with costumes—and offered to sell me anything I could pay for.”—Samuel Lothrop, 1928 journal entry

Mask, K’iche’ (Quiche), Guatemala, circa 1920; wood, cloth and paint; 9” x 7”. 16/0801

Photo by NMAI Staff

Western Mono Basket Jar

This basket woven from deer grass and other plants was gifted to the collection in 1929. The MAI catalog listed only Homer E. Sargent Jr. as the previous owner. However, the original catalog card for the basket discovered in the MAI archives notes this basket was collected from Mary Burkhead, a Western Mono woman from North Fork, California, around 1900. It was part of the collection of Lucy A. Peckinpah of Napa, California, until Sargent purchased it from her estate in 1921. Previously, not only had just one owner of this basket been in the NMAI’s records, the museum had to display it without the name of its artist.

Basket, Mary Burkhead, Western Mono, California, circa 1910; deer grass, sedge root and bracken fern root; 5” x 10”. 16/5503

Photo by NMAI Staff

Boarding School Students

The Retro Accession Lot Project has also reconnected documentation with images in the archives. For instance, the MAI acquired the Sidney S. Wilson collection of images in 1942, yet documents related to the images were transferred to the Huntington Free Library at Cornell University in New York. These include dozens of letters written by Wilson’s sister, Florence, to her family while she was a teacher at a federal boarding school at the Pima Indian Agency in Arizona. The files included lists of Akimel O’Odham (Pima) students with their assigned English names. Through continued research, we hope to identify the students in this photograph.

Group of Akimel O’Odham students at the Pima Indian Agency school in Arizona in 1884. P15787

NMAI Archives

This restoration of information has been crucial to helping Indigenous peoples reunite with cultural items removed from their communities, often generations ago. “Understanding the origins of the items in the collection—where they come from, who they belonged to, how they were used, how they were collected—provides critical context and tells an important story about the life of the belonging,” NMAI’s Head of Conservation Kelly McHugh explained. “Communities need to know how their belongings ended up in NMAI’s collection as they are considered relatives and, in many cases, relatives that have gone missing.”

By piecing together clues from the archives, we have uncovered hidden stories that reconnect Indigenous communities, artists and others with these items. We have also discovered a vast network of dealers, collectors, anthropologists and archaeologists who during the past century helped build the only national collection dedicated to the art, history and living cultures of Indigenous peoples across the Western Hemisphere.

George Heye, holding a Snuneymuxw (Nanaimo) mask and rattle in British Columbia, Canada, in 1938. He used his vast collection from the Americas to found the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation.

Photo by W. A. Newcombe; NMAI Archives P13426

Growing an Institution

What is today the National Museum of the American Indian began with the vision of one man. George Heye was a trained electrical engineer turned investment banker and the son of a wealthy German immigrant who made his fortune in the oil industry. Heye was fascinated with Indigenous cultures from an early age and began collecting arrowheads while at Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey. He purchased the first item for his collection, a Diné (Navajo) deerskin shirt, in 1897 at the age of 23.

Within a few years, he began amassing a large amount of Indigenous cultural materials and referred to this collection as the “Heye Museum.” In 1904, he wrote to his colleague archaeologist George Pepper that, “The young museum has taken on quite a business-like air. I am busy cataloging now during all my spare time and have just reached no. 1,250 and still have several hundred specimens yet to number.”

By the following year, he began talking about founding an institution solely dedicated to the study of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Using his personal wealth, he spent the next decade building a research staff, sponsoring expeditions and funding publications about the work of the “Heye Museum.” By 1908, Heye needed to develop a plan to care for his growing collection. He struck a deal with George Gordon, director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, and in 1909, a portion of Heye’s collection was loaned to the museum, where it could be exhibited. Heye also served on the museum’s Board of Managers. By 1916, Heye had finally gained enough support of several wealthy benefactors to found his own institution, the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation (MAI).

Cultural items came to the MAI in various ways. Heye’s museum staff of professional anthropologists and archaeologists brought items back from their expeditions and excavations. He also developed a vast network of contacts who would help locate objects for purchase from Indigenous individuals, dealers, collectors or auctions. The institution would also exchange items with other museums or be given gifts and bequests. Missionaries, farmers, Indian agents, diplomats, engineers, artists and others sold or donated items to the growing institution. Upon Heye’s death in 1957, MAI’s collection included more than 700,000 items in addition to numerous photographs, rare books and other archival materials.

Heye has often been portrayed as an obsessive, erratic collector, concerned only with acquiring more material. However, research indicates that Heye had focused collecting priorities and strategies. In addition, the emphasis on Heye as a sole collector has obscured the thousands of individuals involved in the creation of the MAI collection. Those contributors who have been in the shadows are now coming to light and providing us with new understandings of the museum’s practices as well as the broader history of Indigenous art collecting in the 20th century.

The Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation as photographed in 1941.

Photo by N. L. Stebbins; NMAI Archives P02974

Lost Connections

When Heye began cataloging his personal collection in 1904, he did so on 3-by-5-inch cards. The records usually only included a catalog number, the object’s name, culture or geographic region, and minimal source information. Collectors or Indigenous individuals deemed notable might be included, but thousands of items were simply described as purchases with no information about from whom the object had been acquired. For many years, collection documentation was kept in files organized by the collector’s name or, when available, an item’s source. However, as many files did not have a direct reference linking them to objects, retrieving information about specific items was difficult.

Heye’s successors as directors of MAI—Edwin K. Burnett from 1956 to 1960 and Frederick J. Dockstader from 1960 to 1975—inherited an understanding of the collection and its filing system. Burnett also created systems to document museum activities, including the compilation of gift, exchange and loan rosters. Dockstader saw the value in the archives and worked to expand them with the acquisition of papers from former MAI staff, such as archaeologists Pepper and Mark R. Harrington. These included field notes of MAI expeditions along with correspondence and photographs.

In 1974, the museum hit a particularly rocky period. Dockstader’s sale of the museum’s collection items without MAI Board approval led to a New York State Attorney General investigation, and MAI dismissed him in 1975. Dockstader’s departure led to a tremendous loss of institutional knowledge. The MAI was faced with completing a court-ordered full inventory of the collection, and focus was placed on that work for the next several years as well as finding a new home for the financially burdened MAI.

By the time the MAI collection was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution in 1990, the collection had grown in number to nearly a million objects and photographs. MAI’s absorption into the Smithsonian further disrupted connections between the collection and its documentation. In 1999, the paper records of the MAI were transferred to the NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center newly built in Suitland, Maryland. However, as staff members had been busy working on opening the new George Gustav Heye Center in New York in 1994, moving the object collection from New York to Maryland from 1999 to 2004 and then opening the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 2004, they could not complete the processing of the collection until 2011.

Another complication was that a portion of the MAI archives kept at the Huntington Free Library in the Bronx was not transferred to the Smithsonian with the rest of the collection. In 1930, the MAI lacked space for their growing rare book and archival collection, and MAI patron Archer Huntington built an addition to the Huntington Free Library to serve as the repository for MAI’s material. The library was given 40,000 volumes on Indigenous archaeology, ethnology, history, rare books and significant manuscripts as well as documentation directly related to MAI collections and expeditions.

While MAI staff considered this material to be part of the MAI collection, the library’s trustees disagreed. After 15 years in court, the Smithsonian lost its claim to the material in 2004, and the Huntington Free Library sold the collection to Cornell University in New York, where it remains today. This loss to the NMAI further disconnected MAI archival documentation from the collection.

Recovering Histories

The Retro Accession Lot Project was launched in 2010 to locate, standardize and digitize collections documentation so that they would be fully searchable and accessible to staff, researchers and Indigenous communities. An “accession lot” is a numbering system that records an item or group of objects that were acquired from a particular source on a particular date. With this accession information, NMAI could begin to rebuild the provenance, or record of an object’s ownership, for the entire collection.

Rather than starting with an object and trying to locate information about it, it was decided to start with the archival documentation and match it to the objects. This strategy changed everything. With digitized documents, we could finally piece together information found in different locations in the archives. Some documentation on its own might not tell the full story, but when paired with other pieces, the picture got clearer and gave a better springboard for research, something we never had before.

In 2012, I joined the project as the primary researcher. Over time I became more familiar with the collecting strategies of the MAI and its founder George Heye. I began keeping a timeline to track the whereabouts of museum staff through the years to better understand their motivations and collecting habits. I identified collectors and sellers, determining whether they kept notes or photographs, and tried to narrow down the usual suspects that were sources of objects in different regions. In 2015, the project expanded to include reviewing archives at other institutions, including Cornell University. This also sometimes meant conducting genealogical research on individuals to track the path of items from hand to hand.

Tackling the provenance history of a museum collection of this size has been an incredible undertaking, but the result has been worth it. We have made the collection more accessible and obtained a better understanding of when and how objects entered the museum. We have also discovered the names of thousands of individuals who were never before associated with these items. Restoring this rich history allows the NMAI to offer Indigenous communities, researchers and museum visitors the most accurate information about this vast collection. It also helps the museum reckon with its history of separating Indigenous peoples from their cultural heritage.

“This project has an enormous impact on engagement with collections items,” said NMAI’s Head of Collections Care and Stewardship Cali Martin (Osage/Kaw). “The dots are finally connected, which means we can provide an incredible amount of information to our constituents.”

“Conservators attempt to use the material evidence to help understand the story of an object. The Retro Accession Lot Project helps us connect the material evidence to the history, putting everything in context. This results in more informed and responsible conservation, care and stewardship,” said McHugh. “The provenance information revealed because of this project also plays a critical role in helping Indigenous communities understand the past to pursue ethical return or shared stewardship arrangements for the future.”

Although we have revealed fascinating connections through this project, the work is far from over. We are excited to see what we will discover next.

Authors

Maria Galban

Maria Galban is collections documentation manager for the National Museum of the American Indian. Since 2012, she has been the primary researcher for the Retro Accession Lot Project.

Making Memories with Dolls

ThorneLE — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 19:00:00 +0000

Beyond the Galleries

Making Memories with Dolls

From Issue: Winter 2023 / Vol. 24 No. 4

by Anne Bolen

This past May, visitors at the National Museum of American Indian’s imagi-NATIONS Activity Center had the opportunity to experience part of the museum’s collection in a unique way. Sally Gunhee Kim showed a room full of children and adults how to use their senses to notice everything they could about a set of elaborately beaded and decorated cloth dolls in the collection. She had created samples made from the same kinds of materials so they could experience what their tanned animal hide felt like, inhale their smokey smell and even listen to their cowry shells jingling. This multisensory approach to exploring these dolls was all the more unusual given Kim could not hear those sounds herself.

Inspired by the dolls of Juanita and Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty (in front), Sally Kim beaded pieces of smoked hide to share at her program.

Photo by NMAI Staff

During her NMAI program in May, Kim showed her smoked hide samples to museum visitors, who could not only see but touch, smell and hear them as their beads and cowry shells jingled.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Born deaf to South Korean immigrants, Kim grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, where her mother would take her to art galleries and museums almost every other week. She enjoyed immersing herself in the art and cultural belongings on display.

Kim hasn’t let being deaf slow her down. She would go on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Physical Chemistry and Visual Arts from Brown University in Rhode Island, and a Master of Art Conservation from Queen’s University in Ontario. She has already published research papers about heritage conservation as well as accessibility and disability identities in a museum setting.

Her fascination for dolls also began when she was a child. She taught herself to sew, and later as a young adult, how to create her own dolls out of used cloth. But, she said, “I never outgrew the habit of making and collecting dolls.”

Yet Kim didn’t anticipate her love of dolls would lead her to a research project at NMAI. For the past two years, she served as an NMAI Andrew Mellon fellow. She evaluated records from the more than 2,740 dolls in the collection at NMAI's Conservation Research Center to choose which of them she would study. In the end, she chose to focus on five “soft-sculpture” dolls made by three generations of Dakota/Nakota artists: Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty, her daughter Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty and her granddaughter Jessa Rae Growing Thunder. They create not only full-size Dakota/Nakota regalia but also cloth and animal-brain-tanned hide dolls wearing traditional historical Dakota/Nakota clothing adorned with colorful glass microbeads, porcupine quills and accessories.

Kim worked closely with Juanita virtually and when she visited the NMAI's Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland, for three days during 2023. She interviewed her about her memories about her family as well as their approach to making dolls. Juanita recalled how she learned to sew by watching her mother. “I saw mother sewing everyday," she said. "I practiced until now I can practically sew with my eyes closed.”

Juanita has in turn not only taught her daughter but also her nieces, nephews and others in her community how to sew. She said she was glad Kim included children in her program as "making it for the youth was important to me. It is how our culture is carried on.”

Juanita said working with Kim was a joy, not only because of her sincere interest in her family's artworks but also because she understood how making dolls was “a sensory thing." Juanita teaches "how it all feels—the beads when they are sewn down, the evenness of a flat stich, the 'hump' of a lazy stitch."

Kim said she was attracted to the dolls the women made because as a dollmaker herself, she felt as she examined them she could “understand what the Growing Thunder women were sensing and feeling” as they made them. Each doll tells its own story, whether it depicts a young girl coming of age or a warrior chief.

At the program, Kim talked about the dolls in the museum's collection while NMAI's Head of Conservation Kelly McHugh and other staff showed two of the Growing Thunder dolls to the audience. Kim then encouraged the attendees to make paper dolls that represented their family and friends, which in turn created their own memories. “I wanted them to have something tangible that they could take with them,” Kim said.

While they were working on their projects, Kim and NMAI staff took the beaded hide samples she had created to each table, letting participants touch, smell and listen to them. One girl commented that she thought the dangling cowry shells sounded like ocean waves, and a boy said the hide smelled like smoke from his father’s barbeque grill.

Shannon Wagner, the imagiNATIONS Activity Center's lead educator, assisted with the program. She said Kim's warmth and enthusiam emanated throughout her presentation, and that she "really connected with the kids."

“Sally is very inclusive," Juanita said. "She had a better understanding of how to approach this because of her own disability. It gave her a slightly different viewpoint. I was open to it, and appreciated it.”

Kim reads lips to understand those with whom she is conversing. So to work with Juanita and others, NMAI staff ensured that those people talking to her who wanted to wear a mask for protection from respiratory diseases were provided one with a clear plastic window so Kim could see their lips. In addition, she used the live transcription function on virtual conference calls and sat in the front row at in-person staff meetings to see presenters clearly.

While such accommodations enabled Kim to conduct her research at NMAI and she feels accessibility at museums "is getting better," many have a long way to go. For example, she said, the museums she visited as a child still show videos without captions. And to protect items on display, most museums use glass to separate visitors from them so that the only sense people can use to interact with them is sight.

Kim now serves as a conservator at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, British Columbia. She continues to create dolls as well as promote access and equity in museums.

“Sally was such a good teacher,” said McHugh, who oversaw Kim’s study at the NMAI. "She has increased our general awareness of the environment around us, made us more cognizant of the needs of those who cannot hear." All of this, McHugh said, she did "with incredible humor and grace.”

Authors

Anne Bolen

Anne Bolen is executive editor of American Indian magazine.

Home to Mi’kma’ki: More than 500 Mi’kmaw Items in the NMAI Collection are Destined for a New Museum in Nova Scotia

EhrlichK — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 19:56:51 +0000

Beyond the Galleries

Home to Mi’kma’ki: More than 500 Mi’kmaw Items in the NMAI Collection are Destined for a New Museum in Nova Scotia

From Issue: Winter 2022 / Vol. 23 No. 4

by Anne Bolen

On the north coast of Nova Scotia is a cave known to the Mi’kmaw people of Canada as the center of the universe. Tucked into a rocky cliff above a remote beach off Cape Breton, this portal is where the Mi’kmaw cultural hero Kluskap walked from this world into the next. Getting to this sacred place is a difficult trek. One must scramble down a steep ravine, traverse a stream and then scale a cliff to reach it, yet many still choose to make the pilgrimage. “It challenges you physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually,” said Clifford Paul, a Mi’kmaw wildlife manager at the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources. But, he said, “Once you get there, you feel that you have walked the path of your ancestors.”

The Kluskap Cave, named for a Mi’kmaw hero, towers over this beach on the north coast of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia.

Photo courtesy of the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre

Anthropologist Wilson Wallis collected this hymnal from the Mi’kmaw community of Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, in 1912. Here Michelle Marshall-Johnson (Esaksoni First Nation) is looking at its Mi’kmaw symbols.

Hymnal, collected by Wilson D. Wallis; bark and paper Inscribed with ink; 6.8” x 4.5”. 3/2409

Photo courtesy of the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre

Wampum beads of shell were used to weave symbols onto belts to record important events such as treaties being signed between Native nations and Canada or the United States.

Wampum belt, collected for NMAI circa 1908; quahog clam and whelk shell beads, hide and sinew; 2.0” x 36.6”. 1/8677

Photo by NMAI Staff

In this image, Christopher and Mary Josephine Morris are playing “waltes,” a game of chance in which six dice are tossed as a wooden bowl is slammed on the ground or a table.

Photo by Frederick Johnson, 1930, Eskasoni, Nova Scotia. NMAI N19927

While NMAI Conservator Caitlin Mahony (left); NMAI fellow Stephanie Guidera and MDCC colleague Curatorial Associate Kamden Nicholas look on, MDCC Curatorial Associate for Education Basil Johnson (center) demonstrates how to toss the dice during waltes, a game he looked forward to seeing in the collection. “I played it as a young child,” he recalled.

Photo by NMAI Staff

This waltes set is complete with not only the wood bowl and bone dice but also the wood sticks used to keep score.

“Waltes” set, collected by Frederick Johnson, 1930, Millbrook First Nation, Nova Scotia. 17/6518

Photo by NMAI Staff

Tom Gloade poses for his portrait wearing a beaded coat and hat that are part of NMAI’s collection.

Photo by Frederick Johnson, 1930, Merigomish Island, Nova Scotia. NMAI N19838

Tom Gloade's beaded coat and hat, which are part of NMAI’s collection.

Coat and silk sash; collected by Frederick Johnson, 1930; coat materials: wool, cloth, silk ribbon and glass beads; 64.2” x 41.7”. 17/6429

Photo by NMAI Staff

Mali A’n (Morris) Sylliboy wears a peaked cap while standing in front of a “wikuom,” a Mi’kmaw dwelling, built by her parents Christopher and Mary Josephine Morris.

Photo by Frederick Johnson, 1930, Eskasoni First Nation, Nova Scotia. NMAI N19907

That same cap is in the NMAI collection. One interpretation of the “double-curved motif” on women’s caps such as this is that they represent life, with one end of the curve being the beginning, the line as the middle, and the other curve as the end: “We end up where we started.”

Peaked cap; wool. 14.2” x 8.9”. 17/6428

Photo by NMAI Staff

Charlotte Wilmot of the Millbrook First Nation posed for a photo for Frederick Johnson in 1930.

Photo by Frederick Johnson, 1930, Millbrook First Nation, Nova Scotia. NMAI N19819

Nearly a century later, Kamden Nicholas was able to try on that same outfit, assisted by NMAI Fellow Sally Kim.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Louise Mali A’n (Denny) Morris was known for her finely made shopping baskets. Johnson photographed her and her daughter Rita here in the Eskasoni First Nation in Nova Scotia in 1930.

Frederick Johnson, 1930, Eskasoni First Nation, Nova Scotia. N19911

In addition to plainer baskets made for practical, everyday purposes, some were highly decorated with twisted splints of wood or woven sweetgrass, a plant considered to be sacred.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Birch fancy baskets such as this one decorated with dyed porcupine quills were primarily made to sell to Europeans or as trade items. They became popular during the 18th century.

Mi’kmaw, 1900–1910, porcupine quills, birch bark, sweet grass, metal nails and string or twine; 8.9” x 5.9” x 5.1”.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Members of the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre’s Elders’ Advisory Council and Curatorial Group traveled to the future museum site to bless it in August 2021. Left to right: Zabrina Whitman (Glooscap First Nation), Melanie Robinson (Acadia First Nation), Barbara Sylliboy (Eskasoni First Nation), Lorraine Whitman (Glooscap First Nation), Melody Martin-Googoo (Millbrook First Nation) and Mali-Ellen Googoo (Membertou First Nation).

Courtesy of the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre

That connection to homeland, or Mi’kma’ki, and to each other, or Lnu’k, is at the core of Mi’kmaw worldview. Tangible items such as a basket a grandmother decorated with sweetgrass, a cradleboard that carried a great aunt or even the tool that an uncle used to carve a wooden figure can serve as a bridge between these Indigenous peoples and their ancestors.

During the past century, when collectors and museums removed items from Mi’kmaw communities, many of those links were broken. The National Museum of the American Indian has been working with the Mi’kmaw Nation for the past two decades to help heal that gap and bring the Mi’kmaw peoples’ objects in the NMAI collection back to share with their communities. Now that goal is becoming a reality, as the Mi’kmaw’s items are destined for the new Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre (MDCC) being built in central Nova Scotia.

Mi’kma’ki’s Extensive Reach

The Mi’kmaw territory has 35 communities whose homelands, or Mi’kma’ki, stretch across what is now Canada’s Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Quebec. They have lived here for at least 11,000 to 13,000 years, as indicated by radiocarbon-dated charcoal recovered from ancestral sites located in Debert in the center of Nova Scotia. Archaeologist George MacDonald led the excavations of these sites during the 1960s, when he was pursuing his doctorate at Yale University. While the excavations yielded information about Mi’kmaw history and culture, they also took it away, as many of the items found there ended up in museum collections.

Seventeenth-century French explorers and missionaries recorded some of the earliest accounts of the Mi’kmaq. Many people have mistakenly referred to them as “Micmac,” instead of Mi’kmaq (pronounced “meeg-mag”), and that misspelling is still seen today in some signage and archival records. Anthropologist Wilson Wallis visited Mi’kmaw communities from 1911 to 1912 and again with his wife and fellow anthropologist, Ruth, from 1950 to 1953. Together they wrote an extensive account of these communities in their 1955 book, “Micmac Indians of Eastern Canada.” Many of the objects they obtained during that time are in the NMAI collection.

The key to connecting those items to Mi’kmaw families today, however, was a collection of photographs that young researcher Frederick Johnson made from 1930 to 1931, when he spent extensive time in seven Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. He recorded some 200 images of Mi’kmaw people and everyday life in Mi’kma’ki. As the Museum of the American Indian, the predecessor to NMAI, had sponsored some of Johnson’s research expeditions to Indigenous communities in Canada from 1924 to 1931, several of Johnson’s images are in the NMAI archives. Copies of the photographs were also in the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology in Andover, Massachusetts. The Mi’kmaw Nation first learned of the image collection in 1997, when Leah Rosenmeier, who was then an outreach and repatriation coordinator at the Peabody museum, encouraged Cynthia Martin to bring them back and share them with her Mi’kmaw community of Millbrook.

From these images, Catherine Martin (Millbrook First Nation), Elder Murdena Marshall (Eskasoni First Nation), Donald Julien (Millbrook First Nation), Tim Bernard (Millbrook First Nation) and Rosenmeier created an exhibition that toured various venues, including the Nova Scotia Museum and the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. These photos were also featured in a book the confederacy and Peabody museum co-published called “Mikwite’lmanej Mikmaqi’k: Let Us Remember the Old Mi’kmaq.”

The desire to protect the Mi’kmaw ancestral sites that had been excavated sparked an even larger idea: Donald Julian, who was then the executive director of the confederacy, proposed that the Mi’kmaw Nation could have its own museum where images of their communities such as the Johnson collection and Mi’kmaw items could be displayed. The confederacy soon began planning the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre to be built near the former excavation sites and reached out to NMAI to ask if they could bring the Mi’kmaw items in those collections home on a long-term loan.

A Language of Doing

One idea the center will reflect is that language provides a gateway to Mi’kmaw ways of knowing and being that is central to sharing Mi’kmaw history and interpretation. In addition to oral storytelling, before European contact, they used other forms of communication. Mi’kmaw petroglyphs can still be found carved into stone in the town of Bedford near Halifax and Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site in southern Nova Scotia. Histories of the Mi’kmaq Grand Council and treaties with other nations were also recorded in shelled beads, or wampum, that were sewn into images on a belt.

Later the Mi’kmaq developed a written language that expressed their unique use of words. Unlike western languages that often simply have a name for an object such as “book,” their language “is very verb based,” explained Basil Johnson, who is a fluent Mi’kmaw speaker from the Potlotek First Nation. For example, the game played by throwing eight etched bone dice called wapinaqn is “the game you would play until the sun came up,” and a similar game where six dice are tossed as a wooden bowl is slammed on the ground or a table is called “waltes,” which means “to land,” as in the dice are landing in the bowl.

In 2018, language specialists working with the MDCC came to see the collection at NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland. Because the Mi’kmaw language is centered in “doing” and “process,” the words for the objects often took the form of “the thing that does this motion or action.” Understanding the collections through Mi’kmaw worldview changed how the MDCC staff thinks about curation, pivoting from an object-centered approach to a practice-centered approach. “At the MDCC rather than curating baskets, we curate basketmaking,” explains Rosenmeier, who now serves as a research and interpretation specialist for the MDCC. This outcome has affected all subsequent work in the partnership with the NMAI.

Caitlin Mahony, an NMAI conservator who is managing the project, said that this approach has changed the survey of the items. “Our survey structure emphasizes the relationship of the item to practice and associated communities rather than its form or material, which is common in museums,” she said.

The MDCC hired Kamden Nicholas, a member of the Pictou Landing First Nation, as well as Basil Johnson as curatorial associates in collections and education, respectively. They left their communities to dedicate eight months at NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center, examining every Mi’kmaw item in the collection. “Actually getting to see and put your hands on items that are part of your cultural heritage and history means so much, “ said Basil Johnson. Working collaboratively with conservation fellows and interns, the condition of each item was assessed and documented. It was also given a comprehensive description that includes its associated Mi’kmaw language terms and suggestions of how it can be used within the future center.

This information will travel with their items to the MDCC. “One of our end goals is to have our own lexicon and naming conventions,” said Nicholas. “Being wrapped in community knowledge is what keeps [these objects] alive,” added Rosenmeier.

A Tangible Connection

Each visit to the NMAI collection has yielded discoveries and conjured up memories. “The first day walking in you could just feel the energy from everything,” recalled Basil Johnson. When Nicholas’ great-aunt Sarah Francis (Sadie), who is a member of the Elders’ Advisory Council, picked up a birchbark container with visible spoon scrapes, “she felt like she was cooking with her parents, and she could taste the food that they were cooking.”

During the MDCC project, items in the NMAI collection have been matched with those seen in the Frederick Johnson images, such as the coat and hat that Tom Gloade wore as he posed for his portrait. Elder Madonna Johnson (Eskasoni First Nation) and Nicholas were even able to put on the skirt and jacket worn by Charlotte Wilmot of the Millbrook First Nation as she posed for Johnson’s photo nearly a century ago. Because of those images and the NMAI’s careful records, visitors have even found items belonging to their own families. Lillian Marshall, who visited in 2012, held a hat that was worn by her aunt.

“The fact that the Mi’kmaw items in the collection can be directly connected to living family members is notable,” said NMAI’s Head of Conservation Kelly McHugh. “Research conducted by the community to restore these connections is critically important.”

A Shared Stewardship

Now that the assessment of the items is completed, in the next phase of the project MDCC staff will bring practioners—beadworkers, basketmakers, quillworkers and others to the NMAI to guide and possibly address any treatment needed to prepare the items for their final journey home. Once there, the Mi’kmaw community will continue to care for them. This partnership between the NMAI and the MDCC is an exemplary example of shared stewardship, a policy implemented by the Smithsonian Institution in April of this year.

As McHugh said, “We recognize expertise lives in the community, and once the items are home, we know the relationship between us will continue and evolve.” Rachel Shabica, NMAI’s supervisory registrar who has helped coordinate the project, agrees, “The MDCC have been excellent partners and we are already working on plans for our work together to continue.”

When the items do voyage home, “We will be caring for this collection as a nation,” said Tim Bernard, the current MDCC executive director. “We couldn’t applaud NMAI more for their commitment to returning these objects,” said Rosenmeier.

The design for the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre is well underway, and the building is expected to be completed in 2025. In addition to a place where Mi’kmaw community members can be with their ancestors’ items, the cultural center will reflect their worldview and connection to each other and their lands. It will have four galleries with immersive exhibitions through which members of the public can experience Mi’kmaw culture through storytelling, language, art, song and dance. Visitors can also learn about how historic traumas are still impacting the Mi'kmaq today and yet they remain resilient. On the center’s grounds will be multiple self-guided trails that will lead into the nearby forest.

Like Kluskap Cave, the center will be a place for all to pilgrimage, and perhaps just in time. “Knowledge is in community. If we didn’t act when we acted, that knowledge would have been lost in time because those knowledge holders who carried that information would not have been there to engage with us,” said Bernard. “When we have an opportunity to use material that was created by ancestors and share them with the youth today, it connects them to those resources.”

The Elders’ Advisory Council described its vision of the museum as “a grandmother’s nest, where all living things are gathered and shared. We expect it to be a place where the past is relived, explored and validated.”

Authors

Anne Bolen

Anne Bolen is executive editor of American Indian magazine.

A Stitch in Time: Ensuring Thousands of Textiles are Conserved in Comfort

KlingbielEL — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 19:59:29 +0000

Beyond the Galleries

A Stitch in Time: Ensuring Thousands of Textiles are Conserved in Comfort

From Issue: Summer 2022 / Vol. 23 No. 2

by Anne Bolen

Textiles are intimate objects. “They are always with you. From the moment you are born, you are wrapped in a fabric until the moment you leave this world and you are wrapped in another,” said Hector Manuel Meneses Lozano, director of the Museo Textil de Oaxaca (Textile Museum of Oaxaca) in Mexico. Whether it is the rug we step on as we get out of bed or what we chose to wear, these seemingly discreet choices of items, he said, “speak volumes as to who you are.”

This 1880s Shoshone two-hide dress has shoulders fully beaded with seeds. As mentioned in the NMAI book “Identity by Design,” the Shoshone were intermediators in the region’s tribal trading network. This dress style resembles some of those made by the Lakota peoples.

Dress, Shoshone, Colorado, circa 1880; leather, seed beads, red wool, sinew; 64.5” x 54”. 1/8279

Photo by NMAI Staff

The Battle Dress is worn by female relatives of Ton-Kon-Ga (Kiowa Black Leggings Society) warriors. Its yellow patches feature horse heads, representing a Vietnam War veteran in the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry.

Woman’s battle dress, Vanessa Paukeigope Jennings (Kiowa/Akimel O’odham/ Pima), Oklahoma, circa 2000; rainbow selvage red and blue wool, imitation elk teeth, brass sequins, brass bells, military patches, ribbons, dyed leather, German silver conchos, spots and buckle; 50” x 66”. 26/5646

Photo by NMAI Staff

The parents of Cheyenne Brady made her this cloth dress to dance at a powwow.

Girl’s dance outfit by Rebecca Hamilton Brady Southern (Cheyenne/Sac and Fox) and Jon “Poncho” Brady (Arikara); circa 1997; hide; cloth, velvet fabric, satin, glass beads, ribbon, metal, animal bone. 35”x 21”. 26/5187

Photo by NMAI Staff

The needs of the textiles were as varied as their materials. Some had existing holes and were elaborately painted, so best left flat to prevent further tearing.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Seller tags were removed and stapled tags were replaced with hand-sewn ones so that corroding metal wouldn’t ruin fabric.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Wood mats that had come apart were wrapped together with teflon tape to keep all their loose pieces together.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Delicate fabrics, including those made of feathers such as this robe, were gently inspected for any need of cleaning. As Hannah Muchnick said, these feathers “had lives before us, and we don’t want to interfere with the stories their wear tells.”

Photo by NMAI Staff

This jacket made of seal gut would have been waterproof. It is normally pliable but can dry out with age.

Raincoat, Yup’ik, circa 1925; seal gut; 43” x 47”.22/7435

Photo by NMAI Staff

Elizabeth Holford and Veronica Quiguango inspect a parka with tissue-wrapped, foam rolls under its arms to prevent creasing.

Man’s winter coat, Caribou Inuit [Karnermiut/Qaermiut]; Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut, Canada; circa 1913–1916; caribou hide; 52” x 40”. 6/4825

Photo by NMAI Staff

Plains tribes would use bison hides to record the annual “Winter count”—painted imagery of what had happened in the community during the season. Here, artist Dallin Maybee was inspired by historic painted bison hides, including those in the NMAI collection, to create his own, complete with geometric designs that represent bison tracks.

“Conductors of Our Own Destiny” by Dallin Maybee (Northern Inunaina [Arapaho]), Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2013; painted and beaded bison robe, ermine tail, glass and metal beads, satin ribbon; ink; 80” x 96” x 3”. 26/9328

Photo by NMAI Staff

This man’s vest features elaborated beaded flowers on the exterior and cloth on the interior decorated with tennis rackets, showing how Western materials began to be incorporated into Indigenous clothing.

Man’s vest; Plains Cree (Prairie Cree), Pasqua First Nation, Saskatchewan, Canada; circa 1900; cotton and velveteen cloth, glass beads; 23” x 20.5”. 18/8912

Photo by NMAI Staff

Working with such large items is “sometimes a multi-woman job,” said Susan Heald, NMAI’s head of textile conservation (front left). Here the collection team is fitting a wedding manta (robe) from the Lake Titicaca region that is hundreds of years old with a sheet of Tyvek plastic that will help protect it.

Wedding manta, Lake Titicaca, Temple of the Sun, circa A.D. 1700; cotton yarn, animal hair yarn, metallic thread, dyes; approximately 43.5” x 46.5”. 05/3773

Photo by NMAI Staff

Conservator Hannah Muchnick fits a boy’s jacket and pants with a Tyvek plastic, walled tray that will fit the form of the outfit. The team has done this for thousands of textiles in the collection.

Dance outfit, collected 1924, Ch’uta, Bolivia. 13/5690

Photo by NMAI Staff

Volunteer Dianne Dumais (front) fits each rug with a photo of what it would look like unrolled so visitors can see its details. She is also making sure every shelf is labeled with the appropriate culture name to which the textiles belong.

Photo by NMAI Staff

This detail of the manta shows a kaleidoscope of animal and human characters, including a viscacha (far right corner), a rabbitlike animal that may have provided some of the hair for the manta.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Left to right: NMAI’s Head of Conservation Kelly McHugh, Heald and Quiguango prepared embroidered Zapotec clothing from Oacaca, Mexico, that they showed to Dill Yel Nbán, a collective of Yalaltec researchers in Mexico, through a virtual consultation.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Detail of woman’s huipil (blouse), circa 1935–1938, Zapotec, Oaxaca State, Mexico; white cotton cloth, embroidered decoration; 42” x 94”. 19/8697

Photo by NMAI Staff

Ariadna Solis from Dill Yel Nbán in Mexico helped translate information to the members of this collective of researchers during the virtual consultation session.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Conservators Nora Frankel (left) and Muchnick carry an aluminum screen on which sits the objects in their new trays. There they will be shelved according to the region and culture from which they originated.

Photo by NMAI Staff

Even a scrap of fabric can be a time capsule—a record of the history and culture of an individual, a family or an entire community. Clothing can mark a transition such as a birth, passage into adulthood, marriage or death. It can reflect achieving a particular rank or tell of having fought in battle. A single shell or glass bead can indicate trade between peoples hundreds of miles apart.

Conserving such objects and connecting them with the communities from which they came is essential to the National Museum of the American Indian. From 1999 to 2004, as the museum was preparing to exhibit 4,000 items in its new museum in Washington, D.C., it was also relocating its some 800,000 collection items from the museum’s original storage facility in the Bronx, New York, to its new Cultural Resources Center in Maryland. Among these items were thousands of textiles. Staff had only one year to inventory the complete collection before the move. “Everything had to be done so fast,” said Susan Heald, NMAI’s head of textile conservation.

Heald managed to design a flexible housing system for the new Cultural Resources Center that could accommodate existing and potentially future textiles. However, after 15 years of intensive visitation and collection use, the housings had become worn and some items disorganized. So when the opportunity came to evaluate and address the individual storage needs of the collection’s large textiles, this was a monumental project the museum was glad to take on. With multiple grants from the Smithsonian’s National Collections Program Collections Care and Preservation Fund, by the end of 2022 the museum will have upgraded the “housing” of more than 6,000 textiles.

Complex Challenges

The idea for the project was sparked in 2015 when NMAI Conservator Elizabeth Holford and Museum Specialist Veronica Quiguango were attending to the collection. Quiguango is from a long line of Kichwa weavers in Ecuador and said caring for textiles is a “personal connection to my roots.” On constant vigil, they vacuumed each drawer to remove any dust or stray particles. While doing so, they began to note simple yet effective actions that could be done to help conserve the objects.

The items in the collection that were targeted for the project were anything with a “flop factor,” explained Heald. “That which has been woven, twined, knitted, knotted and felted textiles as well as clothing and large, flat flexible items made from fur, feathers, skin, bark, reed and rush.”

Addressing the needs of such a range of objects, however, is not easy. As NMAI’s Head of Conservation Kelly McHugh said, “textiles are complex.” They are often made with multiple materials, each of which has individual needs. Metal can oxidize and corrode. Feathers can’t be handled frequently or washed or their natural oils begin to break down and they become more fragile. Animal skins can also dry and then shrink, causing “fur slippage,” meaning the fur will begin to fall off the skin.

The collection team put together a plan, including calculating about how much attention, and therefore time, each object might need. The collection at the Cultural Resources Center is organized by region and then by culture. In 2017, they began with textiles from the Arctic, worked down through those from North and Central America, and as of 2019, made their way to those from South America. This last phase of the project includes textiles found during archaeological excavations, many of which are thousands of years old.

Customized Accommodations

The Cultural Resources Center is kept at a constant humidity and temperature to help preserve the items. However, many are made of natural materials such as cotton, wool and fur, and “organic materials by nature just want to deteriorate,” said Holford. “We are fighting an ongoing battle we are never going to win. The best we can do is slow down the process and make them as comfortable as possible.” Yet the museum doesn’t take an invasive approach. Holford said, “The most passive way of conserving these objects is to create housing systems that are more sympathetic to the items and good handling protocols.”

Contract conservators Nora Frankel and Hannah Muchnick joined the project in 2019 and have taken on much of the hands-on rehousing work. They employed a housing system NMAI collection team members developed in which every screened drawer would be lined with a white, corrugated polypropylene board. Then they created a tray with walls out of Tyvek, a polyethylene material, fitted around each garment or other textiles to capture any small fragments of threads, feathers or fur or objects such as beads that might fall from cultural items over time. A layer of acid-free, sulfur-free cotton tissue paper was sometimes laid underneath very fragile garments and painted textiles for added protection. The team also developed a folding technique for garments that would allow visitors to see important details without unfolding the garment completely yet take up less room in the tray, enabling more items to be stored per drawer.

Some items need special attention. For example, some pieces of fabric had tags still stapled to them that had to be carefully removed and replaced with a sewn tag to keep them from being marred by corroding metal. Also on the agenda is to humidify and flatten bark cloth and other items made from plant fibers that were folded and distorted.

Many large mats, robes, rugs and tapestries were rolled, which can help prevent them from unraveling or tearing as well as save space. Exceptions include those that were exceedingly fragile or hundreds of years old which were best laid flat. One of these was a potentially 500-year-old, finely woven Inka tapestry recovered from a cave near Lake Titicaca known as the “Temple of the Sun.” Covered in iconic animal and other figures—including a mermaid—the incredibly preserved textile looks as though it was made just a few years ago. As it is a frequently viewed item, rather than having it rolled and unrolled to view the stunning scene of creatures, it will lay flat. “This represents deep history,” commented McHugh. “The complexity of the weave is incredible, and the techniques go way back in time.”

Very large, elaborately decorated items, such as painted robes made from buffalo hide, were also best stored laid out—which means in some cases having shelving to accommodate items that are several feet in diameter. “We learned how to play the Tetris game of collection storage,” Holford said.

Whether a tapestry, a ceremonial dress or an everyday garment, each textile is personal—something the conservators recognize and appreciate. Frankel, a former NMAI Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in conservation, is also a multimedia artist who works in fabric. She said she tends to come at conservation from the maker’s perspective and can often visualize the person who made it from the shape of the clothing or the choice of material. “It is a way to connect to someone through time and space,” she said. For example, “a lining of a vest or jacket, that is just for you. No one else sees it—and people tend to pick bold choices. That tickles me a little bit.”

On a day at the Cultural Resources Center this past May, Muchnick was building a tray to house a Bolivian Ch’uta dance outfit, including a boy’s jacket and pants. As she assessed them, she remarked that the young man must have been about her size. “You get a real sense who wore these garments,” she said. In examining a Shawnee jacket, for instance, she found bits of dried flowers in a pocket, long forgotten by who picked them.

During the rehousing process, every object has been photographed, its information entered into a database and then given its own barcode label secured to its tray. In the case of the rolled rugs and tapestries, each has a photo of the entire item affixed to it on the outside so anyone wanting to see it wouldn’t necessarily have to unroll it, reducing the times it is handled.

Once a textile is prepared and its new housing is complete, where it is stored is just as important. Many Indigenous cultures consider certain objects to be living once created. Some need to see light whereas certain ceremonial or otherwise sacred items that are not to be viewed except by particular people are stored high. A group of Navajo rug weavers came through the center and advised that as many of their weavers are now elders, they needed the rugs placed lower in the stacks to reach them. “This kind of input from the community is so valuable,” said Heald. As the reorganization has optimized storage space, the center has room for any such adjustments as well as for additional items that might come through the door.

Welcoming Communities

The rehousing project will most certainly prolong the life of these textiles in the museum’s care, proving the adage that “a stitch in time, saves nine.” Ultimately, however, the goal of rehousing of these textiles is to increase access to the collection for all the Indigenous communities it represents. During the first phase of the project, in 2018, caribou skin sewers from Nunavut, Canada, visited the Cultural Resources Center and commented about the respect given to their family’s items there. “It makes a difference in how we handle the collection,” McHugh said, “to prevent damage but also as a signifier to our constituency that we are taking time and care for their belongings here.”

Yet not everyone can make the journey to the Cultural Research Center. While the COVID-19 pandemic cut off access to the collection temporarily, it also eventually spurred more access for community members in other countries through virtual consultations. This past spring, NMAI hosted a virtual consult for Dill Yel Nbán, a collective of Yalaltec researchers and others who promote the Zapotec language and culture of the northern mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Meneses Lozano, who has been collaborating with the collective on an exhibition to be featured at his museum, joined them on the virtual consultation, which was conducted in English and Spanish. During the meeting, NMAI staff at the museum in New York opened up and climbed into one of the glass cases in the “Infinity of Nations” exhibition to show them an outfit on display. Then staff at the Cultural Resources Center in Maryland zoomed in on the complex embroidery on some delicate cotton "huipils" (blouses), "rebozos" (shawls) and wrap-around skirts. During the session, one of the researchers in Mexico, linguist Ana Alonso Ortiz, exclaimed in Spanish, “The details are so particular. They are very beautiful.”

Recalling the consultation, Meneses Lozano said, “As someone from museums, I was impressed how far museums could go to offer access to items that we care about. Because most of the time museums hold them in storage in areas where it is very difficult to look at them. Or if they are on display, it is hard to see details behind glass. They really outdid themselves.”

During virtual consultations, community members will be able to take photographs and can receive a recording of the session for their records. Local museums also can see items they might consider for loans while NMAI can learn more about the objects’ identity, use or history from community members.

To further the museum collection’s reach into Indigenous communities, Kichwa intern Sammia Quisintuña Chango from Salasaca, Ecuador, recently joined the team. As a fluent speaker of Kichwa, she initially will be reaching out to weavers from Mexico and Ecuador to invite them to engage with their cultural items virtually and develop a shared stewardship of the collection.

As Quiguango translated for her, Quisintuña Chango explained that as she comes from a family of textile makers. She said, “it is in my blood to do this.” Wearing a blouse she embroidered herself with green, purple and blue thread representing animals, plants and water in her country, she said the clothes Indigenous weavers make “reflect the identities of their communities.”

Quiguango agreed, saying, “Every object has a story. It is a matter of finding the community members to unravel that story.”

Quisintuña Chango said she is looking forward to connecting the vast NMAI collection to Indigenous communities. In addition to proper care, many items need to be visited to thrive. “They are our ancestors and they are alive,” she said. Reuniting with them helps “heal us as individuals and as a community.”

Authors

Anne Bolen

Anne Bolen is executive editor of American Indian magazine.