Curation, Cribbage, Colonialism, Collectibles, and Power
In considering the Hood Museum of Art’s “Decorated Cribbage Board,” several questions spring forth. How does this amalgamation of skeletal remains, Indigenous imagery, European gambling, contested authorship, and partially documented provenance come to exist? To what degree can this object be seen as an extension of the American colonial project or be read as a site of artisanal resistance and economic gain for Alaskan Native communities? What does the creation, sale, and collection of similar objects suggest about the social orders, commercial climates, and environmental impacts endemic to souveniring?
By probing these fundamental questions of ownership, creation, control, space, and power, this digital exhibition has centered collection as the central and, perhaps, problematic tenet of material culture. Thus far unconsidered, though, are two more collections holding this cornerstone artifact: the Hood Museum of Art and this digital exhibition itself.
The Hood Museum of Art is a unique site of collection, after all. In the words of Jacquelynn Baas, “it is… as far as I know, the only college museum responsible for every object of historical and aesthetic value at its institution” (Baas 1985, 10). It began as an eclectic collection of trophies of conquest, scientific instruments, and portraits; even today, the Hood Museum counts among its artifacts the tooth of a mastodon and a Mark Rothko. Furthermore, to borrow from the foundational context with which Philip Deloria begins his article entitled “The New World of the Indigenous Museum:”
“Beginning in the sixteenth century, Renaissance rulers, aristocrats, merchants, and scientists assembled eclectic collections of material–natural history, art, religious relics, and antiquities–into what we commonly refer to as “cabinets of curiosities.” These cabinets–sometimes a literal cabinet, but often a discrete room overstuffed with material–served as both the venue for scholarly study and the performative basis for claims to knowledge, authority, and power.” (Deloria 2018, 107).
Museum collecting in general, from its genesis to the present day, weaves several forms of power into one locality. Knowledge creation, the privileging of certain kinds of art, the association of vastly different objects with one another, the display and objectification of items of cultural significance: each of these acts of power is endowed in the authority of museums. When Indigenous artifacts are the aim of this collecting power, these acts take on weightier, more complicated nuances. So, when Emmons and Heye collected some Alaskan Native artifacts and not others, they, too, participated in the power contestation embodied in the ivory cribbage board. When an early version of the museum at Dartmouth College accepted the donation of a "Decorated Cribbage Board" from the daughter of an alumnus, it did so for a reason; whether this was the result of interest in beautiful, most likely Indigenous art, interest in shifts in Alaskan Native scrimshaw, interest in a potential (but dubious) European maker's hand in a typically Indigenous practice, or interests in the natural world and its incorporation into art is hard to tell. When its descendant, the Hood Museum of Art, included another ivory cribbage board in its recent exhibit entitled This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, it made an implicit statement about the identity of this object that it figures matters most; whether this was the same statement made during the object's acquisition is unclear.
In much the same way, this digital exhibition exerts a complicated form of control over this object. For instance, in it, the cribbage board was placed alongside many of the same sorts of objects it would be surrounded by when sold in a curio shop – but it was also situated alongside historical context and primary source documents telling a different story. The cribbage board was made a central part of an argument; it was used by the curator to tell a story just as a European maker, a Native maker, a European collector, or a Native trader would have done. Instead of a story of colonial conquest or Indigenous reclamation, this story is, broadly, about the role of material culture in shaping social ordering and thinking in late-19th-century Alaska.
Thus, this single, flattened tusk carries into this digital exhibition the full weight of over 150 years of American colonization and military use of unceded Alaskan Native land, over 130 years of the collection of such boards, and the fraught practice of collection and exhibition itself. It carries with it an animal and 99 herd-mates, at least one hunter, at least one artisan, at least one trader, one Commissioner, one nephew, one daughter, one collector, and at least two curators. It carries with it all their stories.
How can we imagine that such a multifaceted object – one harvested, shaped, contested, used, worn down, given, donated, stored, unpacked, viewed, repacked, reproduced, and contextualized – can be read through a single lens? What does this inscrutability – and our insistence that the mystery be solved – tell us about material culture, colonialism, indigeneity, and cribbage?
REFERENCES
Baas, Jacquelynn. “A History of the Dartmouth College Museum Collections,” in Treasures of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (New York: Hudson Hills Press in Association with the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1985), 9–20.
Deloria, Philip J., “The New World of the Indigenous Museum,” Daedalus 147, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 106–115.