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Abstract
Portrayals of the US Southwest's Native American inhabitants as “primitive” relics have been shaped by the intertwining practices of archaeological collection and museum display. Focusing on the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, this essay analyzes the interpellation of museum visitors as citizen archaeologists, a process that re/produces racialized discourses through rhetorics of science and time. It is argued that as visitors excavate remnants of the past they engage an archaeological vision that reinforces dominant constructions of “modern” citizenship. This vision maintains colonial histories by disallowing Native peoples both authorship of the past and belonging in the present.
Notes
[1] Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum,” Western Journal of Communication 69 (2005): 97.
[2] Given that there is not one preferred term for Indigenous peoples in the Southwest or greater United States, who may identify as Indigenous, Native, Native American, American Indian, or by their tribal affiliation, we use a variety of terms in our discussion; however, we use “Indian” only when referring to stereotypical constructions of Native peoples, or when quoting the speech of others.
[3] See, for example, Barbara A. Babcock, “‘A New Mexican Rebecca”: Imaging Pueblo Women,” Journal of the Southwest 32 (1990): 400–437.
[4] Anthony Shelton, “The Imaginary Southwest: Commodity Disavowal in an American Orient,” in Les Cultures à L'Oeuvre: Recontres en Art, eds. Michèle Coquet, Brigitte Derlon, and Monique Jeudy-Ballini (Paris, France: Maison des Sciences De L'Homme, 2005), 76.
[5] Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 3.
[6] Richard A. Rogers, “Deciphering Kokopelli: Masculinity in Commodified Appropriations of Native American Imagery,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (2007): 236.
[7] Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (1989): 108.
[8] Dilworth, Imagining Indians.
[9] Mark Neumann, On the Rim: Looking for the Grand Canyon (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 36.
[10] D. H. Lawrence as quoted in Marta Weigle, “From Desert to Disney World: The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company Display the Indian Southwest,” Journal of Anthropological Research 45 (1989): 130.
[11] Lawrence as quoted in Marta Weigle, “From Desert to Disney World: The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company Display the Indian Southwest,” Journal of Anthropological Research 45 (1989): 132.
[12] The “Hohokam” is what the Native peoples who once occupied the museum location and numerous sites throughout the Southwest are called in museum and other anthropological texts, but the label is not without contestation. Given that many contemporary Southwestern Native Americans are direct descendants of the peoples frequently called “Hohokam,” the popular use of the term to refer to a “disappeared” Southwest civilization invokes a discontinuity between past and present that does not exist. (See Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Living Histories: Native Americans and Southwestern Archaeology [Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2010], 42–43.)
[13] City of Phoenix, Pueblo Grande Museum Archaeological Park, http://phoenix.gov/parks/culture/museum/pueblo/index.html
[14] By archaeology, we mean the use of a particular epistemological framework associated with archaeology as guided by tourism and museum discourses. Certainly, archaeology as a discipline does not always adhere to these epistemologies, nor have critical interpretations been absent from archaeology. Contemporary archaeology has frequently embraced an epistemological shift toward inclusion of Native perspectives and away from cultural resource management and the objectification of Native peoples. What we focus on, however, is PGM's use of a particular strand of archaeological thinking based upon empiricism and excavation. This ideologically and epistemologically positions visitors in ways that exclude Native perspectives and erase the experiences of contemporary Natives Americans outside of the museum. For more, see Laurajane Smith, Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004).
[15] By archaeology, we mean the use of a particular epistemological framework associated with archaeology as guided by tourism and museum discourses. Certainly, archaeology as a discipline does not always adhere to these epistemologies, nor have critical interpretations been absent from archaeology. Contemporary archaeology has frequently embraced an epistemological shift toward inclusion of Native perspectives and away from cultural resource management and the objectification of Native peoples. What we focus on, however, is PGM's use of a particular strand of archaeological thinking based upon empiricism and excavation. This ideologically and epistemologically positions visitors in ways that exclude Native perspectives and erase the experiences of contemporary Natives Americans outside of the museum. For more, see Laurajane Smith, Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 2–3.
[16] Leah Ceccarelli, “Rhetorical Criticism and the Rhetoric of Science,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 318.
[17] Smith, Archaeological Theory, 3.
[18] Smith, Archaeological Theory, 3.
[19] Smith, Archaeological Theory, 3.
[20] Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4 (1988): 73–102.
[21] Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), 84.
[22] Bennett, “Exhibitionary Complex,” 76.
[23] Dilworth, Imagining Indians, 44. For further discussion of the role of museums in the construction of colonial identities see Curtis Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); and Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities (London, UK: Leicester University Press, 1999).
[24] George Dorsey as quoted in Dilworth, Imagining Indians, 55.
[25] Erna Fergusson as quoted in George Dorsey as quoted in Dilworth, Imagining Indians, 58.
[26] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1978).
[27] Neuman, On the Rim, 45.
[28] Michael Kammen, as cited in Neuman, On the Rim, 45.
[29] Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” 108.
[30] While we utilize Aihwa Ong's terminology to describe national subject formation, we depart from Ong in our focus on how members of dominant (rather than marginalized) groups become “cultural citizens.” (See Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States,” Current Anthropology 37 [1996]: 738).
[31] Teresa Bergman, Exhibiting Patriotism: Creating and Contesting Interpretations of American Historic Sites (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013), 16.
[32] Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial,” in At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies, ed. Thomas Rosteck (New York, NY: Guilford Press, 1999), 29; Greg Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 1–27.
[33] J. David Cisneros, “Rhetorics of Citizenship: Pitfalls and Possibilities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100 (2014): 376.
[34] Robert Asen, “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 189–211.
[35] Dickinson et al., “Memory and Myth,” 89.
[36] Bergman, Exhibiting Patriotism, 34.
[37] Aaron Hess, “Critical-Rhetorical Ethnography: Rethinking the Place and Process of Rhetoric,” Communication Studies 62 (2011): 127–152; Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions,” Western Journal of Communication 75 (2011): 386–406.
[38] See, for example, Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 27–47; Kenneth S. Zagacki and Victoria J. Gallagher, “Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 171–191; Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, eds., Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010).
[39] For an exception see Tamar Katriel, “Sites of Memory: Discourses of the Past in Israeli Pioneering Settlement Museums,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 1–20.
[40] Dickinson et al., “Spaces of Remembering,” 30.
[41] For more regarding this methodological intersection at museum sites, see Roger C. Aden et al., “Re-Collection: A Proposal for Refining the Study of Collective Memory and its Places," Communication Theory 19 (2009): 311–336.
[42] Trinh, T. Mihn-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 67.
[43] Richard Rogers describes how the ubiquitous image of Kokopelli has become “a metonym for Southwestern Native Americans [and] an icon of the Southwest in general.” (Rogers, “Deciphering Kokopelli,” 234).
[44] Amanda J. Cobb, “The National Museum of the American Indian,” American Indian Quarterly 29 (2005): 363.
[45] Numerous scholars have examined the associations made between Native Americans and extinction through depictions of Native Americans as a “vanishing race,” or as “living fossils.” See, for instance, Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died For Your Sins (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1969); and Lora Romero, “Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism,” American Literature 63 (1991): 385–404.
[46] The museum's focus on the Hohokam's “disappearance” fits within larger narratives of settler colonialism, especially when referenced in conjunction with the Columbian “discovery,” as one docent did. Pointing to the end of the timeline, he noted, “this was the interesting part—when they disappeared … And when did Columbus discover America?” While his comment was perhaps intended to emphasize Native Americans’ long existence prior to Columbus’ arrival, the emphasis on the culture's disappearance may also reinforce a vision of settlers in the Southwest—and “The New World” more broadly—arriving in an otherwise “empty” land.
[47] This is further evidenced in one museum sign, which describes a Pima narrative of the area's settlement as “A Legend.”
[48] This language of vision draws from Dickinson and colleagues, who discuss the Plains Indian Museum's use of anthropological vision to position visitors as professional interpreters of existing “exotic” cultures. While similar, archaeological vision emphasizes the scientific interpretation of the past's remains, perpetuating a vision of a culture that no longer exists (Dickinson et al., “Spaces of Remembering,” 35).
[49] Ames, Cannibal Tours, 51.
[50] Cobb, “National Museum of the American Indian,” 363.
[51] Ames, Cannibal Tours, 51.
[52] Johannes Fabian argues that anthropological uses of Time contribute to “the denial of coevalness to the cultures studied,” locating contemporary Others outside of the anthropologist's shared Time. (Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983], 35.)
[53] See, for example, Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1964).
[54] For further discussion see Dilworth, Imagining Indians, and Neumann, On the Rim.
[55] Karma R. Chavez, “Border (In)Securities: Normative and Differential Belonging in LGBTQ and Immigrant Rights Discourse,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2010): 139.
[56] Dickinson et al., “Spaces of Remembering,” 28.
[57] Celeste Lacroix, “High Stakes Stereotypes: The Emergence of the Casino Indian Trope in Television Depictions of Contemporary Native Americans,” The Howard Journal of Communications 22 (2011): 6.
[58] For discussion, see Phillip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
[59] Dilworth, Imagining Indians, 164.
[60] Maxwell, Colonial Photography, 22.
[61] Rhiannon Mason, “Cultural Theory and Museum Studies,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), 18.
[62] Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, “The Museum in the Disciplinary Society,” in Museum Studies in Material Culture, ed. Susan M. Pearce (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989), 71.
[63] Bergman, Exhibiting Patriotism, 21.
[64] For more on decolonizing museums, see Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
[65] Ong, “Cultural Citizenship,” 738.
[66] Much of the literature on citizenship examines the exclusionary rhetoric that surfaces in immigration debates. We add to these robust discussions through our analysis of the intersections of public memory and scientific epistemologies, thereby offering additional lenses to understand the complexities of cultural citizenship. See Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 17–36.
[67] Angela Cavender Wilson, What Does Justice Look Like?: The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland (St. Paul, MN: Living Justice Press, 2008), 11.
[68] For a further discussion of the “noble” and “ignoble” savage, see Lacroix, “High Stakes.”
[69] Wilson, What Does Justice Look Like?, 83.