Lessons learned from the Quincentenary

I lingered a few moments at the end of a field trip to the Arizona Historical Museum to ask Mary Ann Ruelas about the Geronimo exhibit. Specifically I wanted to know who they consulted when designing it. She told me that they have many contacts within the local Native American community who help ensure that their archival material is accurately and sensitively displayed.

Then, thinking about the exhibits that had been put together by much larger institutions in recognition of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ journey to the Americas (aka: Quincentenary) and the controversies that swirled around some of them, I asked her how the Smithsonian, for example, could put together exhibits that seem one-sided or incomplete. Mary Ann thought that possibly they feel that all of the expertise they need is in-house and don’t need to consult others outside the institution which would provide different points-of-view (M.A. Ruelas, personal communication, September 17, 2012).

After four years of work, the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution opened an exhibit in late October 1991 called “Seeds of Change: Five Hundred Years of Encounter and Exchange”.  An article in the Chicago Tribune appearing a few days before the opening described it this way: “The $2.8 million show celebrates 500 years of cultural and biological changes since Christopher Columbus arrived in America. The five seeds that Columbus sowed on both sides of the Atlantic with his voyages to the new world are sugar, corn, the potato, disease and the horse” (Haddix, 1991). 

In materials designed to encourage other institutions to book the travelling exhibit, the tone was light, upbeat and celebratory. It was based on the initial press releases and descriptions produced by the Smithsonian that the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History selected “Seeds of Change” as their next summer “blockbuster”. Usually a very sleepy place over the summer months, the Museum had brought animatronic dinosaurs two years in a row to their facility and was thrilled when the community turned out in droves. They were looking for the next big thing and thought that “Seeds of Change” might just be it.

My husband was employed by the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History at the time and shared with me that the Anthropology Department put together a review committee of outside experts, including representatives from the Chumash Tribe, and proceeded to delve deeply into the content. They quickly discovered that the exhibit would have to be modified substantially to accurately reflect the impact the five “seeds” had locally - particularly the “seed” of disease - and backed out.  The public was unaware that any of this was going on and, when the last minute substitute, “The World of Beatrix Potter”, opened, they embraced it, returning again and again.

Pauline Turner Strong (1997) puts forward the argument in an article titled “Exclusive Labels: Indexing the National “We” in Commemorative and Oppositional Exhibitions” that the curators of the “Seeds of Change” exhibit were being strategic in their choices in order to entice audiences to enter the exhibit, and the exhibit itself was largely benign when compared to some others developed as part of the Quincentenary (pp. 43 & 46).

Preceding “Seeds of Change” was an exhibit titled “First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the United States, 1492-1570.” It opened at the Florida of Museum of Natural History in 1989 and the focal point was a two-thirds scale replica of Columbus’s ship La Niña.  The author tells us that “schoolchildren visiting the exhibition took the role of explorers, boarding the ship and shooting imaginary Indians on shore. Despite its invocation of the seemingly inclusive and dialogical concept of ‘encounters’ in the exhibition’s main label, the theme of “First Encounters” was exploration, and its collective subject, its ‘we’, was clearly Euro-American” (Strong, 1997, p. 47).

Russell Means and others protested the exhibit, causing museums that had planned to show it to cancel.  By the time it arrived in Albuquerque, the materials had been edited to present the Native American perspective.  The Science Museum of Minnesota, however, took it a lot further and actually embedded a counter exhibit they called “Native Views: From the Heart of Turtle Island” into “First Encounters”. Though a few new items were added to the exhibit from their own collection, the “Native Views” exhibit consisted primarily of additional labels.

Dr. Strong (1997) shared a few examples:

“What is offensive about First Encounters?” asked a counter-label beside the replica of the Niña. It answered: “For many Euro-Americans this replica of the Niña is a source of pride. For indigenous people, the Niña symbolizes death and destruction.”

Beside a life-size portrayal of the exchange of trade goods, a similar counter-label objected to presenting indigenous people in a case like an exotic, extinct species thereby calling into question the presuppositions underlying natural history museums in general. (pp. 51-52)

Dr. Strong (1997) calls this type of labeling polyphonic, and states that the reason she liked this approach was the fact that the labels were side-by-side. “This proved to be an extremely effective strategy for voicing alternative truths, stimulating dialogue and encouraging critical thinking about the basis of any institutional claim of truth” (p. 52).

According to Dr. Strong (1997), the Native American artistic responses to the Quincentenary were tobacco, alcohol, gunpowder, gold and land.  Peter Davis (2000) concurs, noting that leaving out tobacco from “Seeds of Change” was a major oversight (p. 314).  Assuming that the National Museum of Natural History had access to some of the Native American artistic artifacts that Dr. Strong refers to, it might have been interesting to have selected these five “seeds” and interpreted them from both a Native American and Euro-American perspective. It might also have been wise to consider going deeper on fewer “seeds” rather than try to cram too much into one exhibit.

The fees associated with “renting” a travelling exhibit can be quite steep, not to mention the packing and shipping costs the institution has to bear when it is time to send it on to the next location. Many museums, like the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, don’t have the financial resources or the time required to incorporate major changes into an exhibit that is supposed to come ready-to-display-right-out-of-the-box or mount a counter exhibit.  Polyphonic labeling may be a more cost-effective answer to this dilemma that smaller museums can adopt but, in my mind, a better solution would be for the major institutions to be more proactive, involving diverse voices in exhibit development the moment an idea begins to take shape.

References

Davis, P. (2000). Museums and the promotion of environmental understanding and heritage conservation. In MacManamon, F. and Hatton, A., (Eds.), Cultural resource management in contemporary society: Perspectives on managing and presenting the past, (pp. 310-318). New York: Routledge.

Haddix, C. (1991, October 21). Seeds of change: New Smithsonian exhibit dwells on exchange of foodstuffs after 1492. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-10-24/entertainment/9104050954_1_corn-exhibit-christopher-columbus

Strong, P. (1997). Exclusive labels: Indexing the national ‘we’ in commemorative and oppositional exhibitions. Museum Anthropology, 21(1), 42-56.