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Abstract
Museums, memorials, and other historic places are key sites in the construction of collective memory and national identity. The Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming is one such space of memory where the (pre)history of “America” and its native peoples is told. Based on the view of texts as experiential landscapes, it is argued that this museum works to absolve Anglo-visitors of the social guilt regarding Western conquest through a rhetoric of reverence. This rhetorical mode invites visitors to adopt a respectful, but distanced observational gaze. A concluding section assesses the social and political consequences of memorializing in this mode.
The authors wish to thank the Colorado State University Speech Communication writing group, including Karrin Vasby Anderson, Carl Burgchardt, Michelle Holling, and Naomi Rockler for their contributions to this essay.
Notes
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2002 convention of the Western States Communication Association.
1. Quoted in Robert J. Moore, Native Americans: The Art and Travels of Charles Bird King, George Catlin and Karl Bodmer (Edison, NJ: Chartwell Books, 2002), 125.
2. Brian W. Dippie, “The Visual West,” in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press), 682.
3. Moore, Native Americans, 8.
4. Quoted in Moore, Native Americans, 147.
5. Quoted in Dippie, “The Visual West,” 685.
6. Museums have not always been viewed as protectors of history. In France in the nineteenth century, for instance, early museums were accused of threatening history rather than preserving it because they removed artifacts from their original, “living” contexts and promoted passive modes of observation. Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, museums were increasingly understood as “educational institutions with important and far-reaching social roles.” See Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000), 2. Historical and cultural preservation is now considered to be among a museum's most important social roles. See Bernard J. Armada, “Memorial Agon: An Interpretive Tour of the National Civil Rights Museum,” Southern Communication Journal 63 (1998): 235; Susan A. Crane, “Of Museums and Memory,” in Museums and Memory, ed. Susan A. Crane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3–5; Tamar Katriel, “Sites of Memory: Discourses of the Past in Israeli Pioneering Settlement Museums,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 1; and Gaynor Kavanagh, “Making Histories, Making Memories,” in Making Histories in Museums, ed. Gaynor Kavanagh (New York: Leicester University Press, 1996), 1–3. Indeed, social scientific research suggests that history museums are considered by the American public to be the most trustworthy source of history, ranking above conversation with witnesses, college history professors, high school teachers, and non-fiction books. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 21.
7. Treasures From Our West (Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1992), 34.
8. The Buffalo Bill Historical Center is a non-profit organization whose funding comes from three main sources: admission fees, endowments/grants, and donations. The central mission of the Center according to Marketing Assistant Josie Hedderman is to “educate the public by advancing knowledge about the American West through acquiring, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting collections” (Josie Hedderman, E-mail interview, 8 March 2004). For an historical account of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, see Richard A. Bartlett, From Cody to the World: The First Seventy-Five Years of the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association (Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1992).
9. Visitor's Guide: Buffalo Bill Historical Center (Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 2000).
10. According to museum curators, “Most visitors to the Plains Indian Museum come with little or no knowledge about Plains Indian cultures; if anything, they come with familiar and erroneous stereotypes of American Indians.” See Plains Indian Museum Buffalo Bill Historical Center: A Reinterpretation (Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 2002), 5. While the original 1979 installation did little to challenge these views, the “reinterpretation” represents a “major shift in interpretive focus by providing a significantly greater humanities interpretation” (Plains Indian Museum, 7).
11. Plains Indian Museum, 5.
12. Plains Indian Museum, 9. The PIM advisory board consisted of Arthur Amiotte (Lakota), Custer, South Dakota; Silas S. Cathcart, Lake Forest, Illinois; Mrs. Henry H. R. Coe, Cody, Wyoming; Dr. Michael D. Coe, New Haven, Connecticut; Robert D. Coe, II, Cody, Wyoming; Garrett E. Goggles (Northern Arapaho), Fort Washakie, Wyoming; Joe Medicine Crow (Crow), Lodge Grass, Montana; Lloyd K. New (Cherokee), Santa Fe, New Mexico; Harold Ramser, Jr., Murrieta, California; Kenneth Ryan (Assiniboine), Box Elder, Montana; Harriet Stuart Spencer, Long Lake, Minnesota; Abraham Spotted Elk (Northern Cheyenne), Ethete, Wyoming; Darwin J. St. Clair (Shoshone), Fort Washakie, Wyoming; Curly Bear Wagner (Blackfeet), Browning, Montana; Margo Grant Walsh (Chippewa), New York, New York.
13. Plains Indian Museum, 9.
14. Recognizing that “interpretation is always contingent upon … the audience,” we have limited our critical claim to the experience of Anglo-visitors. See Helene A. Shugart, “Reinventing Privilege: The New (Gay) Man in Contemporary Popular Media,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 68; see also Stanley E. Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum,” Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1980), 182. While it would certainly be interesting and informative to know how American Indians understand the PIM, our concern in this study is with how the museum addresses Anglo-visitors. Located as it is in a state that, according to the US Census Bureau, is 92.1 percent “White,” the PIM is a key site in constructing memory of Western settlement in the “White imagination.” Although the BBHC maintains geographic data about visitors to the museum, they do not maintain specific demographics regarding ethnicity (Hedderman, E-mail interview).
15. According to Kenneth Burke, human beings can (symbolically) address guilt in one of three ways—mortification, victimage, or transcendence. The first two ways stress punishment of either the self (through atonement) or someone else (through scapegoating). Transcendence, by contrast, is a strategy of avoidance, in which public discourse (such as a museum) shifts the “terms” of a conflict or debate, erecting a new, nobler social hierarchy. In the new hierarchy, the guilt-producing actions are no longer sources of guilt. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 80–105.
16. The guilt to which we are referring is, in many cases, deeply repressed. We see its return in the “imperialist nostalgia” about which Renato Rosaldo writes. See Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989), 69. Laurie Anne Whitt argues that the marketing of Native American spirituality in particular serves to assuage this Anglo American guilt for destroying the life world of Native Americans. See Laurie Anne Whitt, “Cultural Imperialism and the Marketing of Native America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19 (1995): 7. Richard Drinnon asserts that the making of US American identity depends on metaphysics of Indian hating, a metaphysics that the PIM attempts to ignore through its rhetoric of transcendence. See Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 463–64. Philip Deloria argues that the violence against Indians so central to US American identity continues to influence “a long night of American dreams.” See Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 191.
17. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991); John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3–15; John R. Gillis, “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship,” Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 9–11, 16–17; Liza Nicholas, “Wyoming as America: Celebrations, A Museum, and Yale,” American Quarterly 54 (2002): 448–49; and James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 1–15.
18. See Stephen H. Browne, “Reading Public Memory in Daniel Webster's Plymouth Rock Oration,” Western Journal of Communication 57 (1993): 464; Stephen H. Browne, “Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Commemoration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 169; M. Lane Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance: The Rhetorical Dimensions of National Identity Construction (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); and Marouf Hasian, Jr. and Robert E. Frank, “Rhetoric, History, and Collective Memory: Decoding the Goldhagen Debates,” Western Journal of Communication 63 (1999): 98.
19. See Armada, “Memorial Agon,” 235–43; Carole Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality,” Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Carole Blair, Marsha Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci, Jr., “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 263–88; Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial,” At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies, ed. Thomas Rosteck (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 29–83; Greg Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 1–27; Marouf Hasian, Jr., “Remembering and Forgetting the ‘Final Solution’: A Rhetorical Pilgrimage through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 64–92; Victoria J. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2 (1999): 303–20; Victoria J. Gallagher, “Remembering Together: Rhetorical Integration and the Case of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial,” Southern Communication Journal 60 (1995): 109–19; and Tamar Katriel, “Sites of Memory,” 1–20.
20. Armada, “Memorial Agon,” 235.
21. Blair, “Contemporary,” 18.
22. See Crane, “Of Museums and Memory,” 5; Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation, 3.
23. Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 274–78.
24. Barry Brummett, Rhetoric in Popular Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 80.
25. Henri Lefebvre, The Social Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 222, writes: “A spatial work (monument or architectural project) attains a complexity fundamentally different from the complexity of a text, whether prose or poetry. As I pointed out earlier, what we are concerned with here is not texts but texture. We already know that a texture is made up of a usually rather large space covered by networks or webs; monuments constitute the strong points, nexuses, or anchors of such webs. The actions of social practice are expressible but not explicable through discourse; they are, precisely, acted—and not read. A monumental work, like a musical one, does not have a ‘signified’ (or ‘signifieds’); rather, it has a horizon of meaning: a specific or indefinite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore, by means of—and for the sake of—a particular action.”
26. Blair and Michel, “Commemorating,” 58–59.
27. Meaghan Morris, “Things to Do with Shopping Centres,” Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan Sheridan (New York: Verso, 1988), 224, no. 17.
28. Blair and Michel, “Commemorating,” 58.
29. Kavanagh, “Making Histories,” 4, 3.
30. Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Places and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 28.
31. William Deverell, “Fighting Words: The Significance of the American West in the History of the United States,” A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Allan G. Boque, and Clyde A. Milner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 37.
32. Deloria, Playing Indian, 4–7. The literature on non-Native American uses of images of Indianness is vast. See, for example, S. Elizabeth Bird “Introduction: Constructing the Indian, 1830s–1990s,” Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture, ed. S. Elizabeth Bird (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 1–12; Martin Barker and Roger Sabin, The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995); Drinnon, Facing West; Rennard Strickland, Tonto's Revenge: Reflections on American Indian Culture and Policy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 17–45, 63–75.
33. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 82–90; Morris, “Things,” 206.
34. Blair and Michel, “Commemorating,” 67, 71.
35. John Darwin Dorst, Looking West (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 96.
36. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the ‘Peuple Québécois’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 138.
37. Lefebvre, The Social Production, 194.
38. Ian Buchanan, “Heterophenomenology, or de Certeau's Theory of Space,” Social Semiotics 6 (1996): 126.
39. Dorst, Looking West, 167.
40. Our locution eye/I is meant to maintain the relationship between seeing and subjectivity, location and identity. We are arguing that subjectivities are constituted in part by perspective, that is to say by angles of view created through the subject's position in the landscape. This is simply an extension of W. J. T. Mitchell's argument that human subjectivity is “constituted by both language and imaging” (W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 4). Also see, Burgin, In/Different Spaces, 226; James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Harcourt, 1996), 11–12.
41. “Buffalo Bill Historical Center: Five Museums in One,” Cody Country: Gateway to Yellowstone Park (Cody, WY: Cody Enterprise, 2003), 4.
42. Buffalo Bill Museum (Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1995), 4.
43. Dorst, Looking West, 97.
44. “A Glimpse of the Real West,” Explore Cody, 24 May 2003: Advertising Section 1,4; See also Nicholas, “Wyoming,” 437–65.
45. “The beauties of Wyoming are largely scenic. … The essential and specific beauty of Wyoming, then, is one of open spaces culminating in mountain ranges. … There are not many places in Wyoming from which you can't see a mountain. … From most of the mountains, in turn, you get expansive views of the plains or wide valleys” (Nathaniel Burt, Compass American Guides: Wyoming, 4th ed. [New York: Fodor's Travel Publications, 2002], 15–6).
46. Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 71.
47. Burt, Compass, 16; Candy Moulton, Roadside History of Wyoming (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press, 1995), 1; Robert W. Righter, “A Mosaic of Different Environments,” A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Allan G. Boque, and Clyde A. Milner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 127; William M. Savage, Jr., The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History and Culture (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 61.
48. Tompkins, West of Everything, 69–70.
49. Moulton, Roadside, 1.
50. Savage, The Cowboy, 61.
51. Burt, Compass, 16.
52. Popular images (i.e., literature, art, cinema, and tourist books) of a vast and barren western landscape have played a central role in constructing the heroic image of the American cowboy. See Anne Butler, “Selling the Popular Myth,” The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 790; Moulton, Roadside, 1; Janice Hocker Rushing, “The Rhetoric of the American Western Myth,” Communication Monographs 50 (1983): 15; Savage, The Cowboy, 61–2; Tompkins, West of Everything, 71–3).
53. Craig Sodaro and Randy Adams, Frontier Spirit: The Story of Wyoming, Revised and updated (Boulder, CO: Johnson Books, 1996), 3.
54. Traveling up the canyon, explains another travel guide, “it would be hard to exaggerate the effect of the pinnacles, especially when seen against an intense, blue Wyoming sky” (Burt, Compass, 195).
55. Burt, Compass, 196.
56. Jerry Camarillo Dunn, Jr., The Smithsonian Guides to Historic America: The Rocky Mountain States, Revised and updated (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1998), 225.
57. Albert Bierstadt “gave Americans a western Eden just a little grander than reality. Miniature bear, deer, and Indians cavorted in the foreground while behind them, glimmer-glass lakes, shafts of light, and silver threads of plunging water carried the eye up peaks that soared to extravagant, cloud-piercing heights. He made unspoiled western nature his equivalent of [George] Catlin's unspoiled western natives” (Dippie, “The Visual West,” 689).
58. See Kevin Michael DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo, “Imagining Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 254; See also Dorst, Looking West, 101.
59. Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 63.
60. Plains Indian Museum, 9.
61. Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8.
62. Vine Deloria, writing about the relationship between American Indians and anthropologists writes: “Into each life, it is said, some rain must fall. … But Indians have been cursed above all people. Indians have anthropologists”. See Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Avon, 1969), 87.
63. di Leonardo, Exotics, 33–4.
64. This migration display is set up in a sort of migratory pattern in the museum that leads the visitor from the display of the traditional house to the display honoring the hunting of the buffalo. Here, the voices start only when the visitor pauses under the speaker to view the display.
65. Kay Anderson and Mona Domosh, “North American Spaces/Postcolonial Stories,” Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 125–29.
66. Gallagher, “Memory,” 314.
67. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), 6.
68. The discourse of progress underlies the rhetoric of at least two of the other museums in the BBHC, the Draper Natural History Museum and the Cody Firearms Museum.
69. As is the case in other parts of the museum, the narrative and the visuals work to reinforce familiar gender stereotypes. Young men go on vision quests and hunt, while women teach girls domestic arts that will make them desirable marriage partners. As contrast to the gender stereotypes motivated by the museum, the lived experiences and voices of Plains Indian women are far more complex. See, for example, the work of Joy Harjo, a member of the Creek (Muscogee) tribe. Joy Harjo, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002); Joy Harjo, The Spiral of Memory: Interviews, ed. Laura Coltelli (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996); Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990); Joy Harjo and Stephen Strom, Secrets from the Center of the World (Tucson: Sun Tracks and The University of Arizona Press, 1989).
70. Randall Lake, “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 127.
71. Lake, “Between Myth,” 126. As Michael Kammen argues, this emphasis on progress is fundamental to American culture and is also crucial to understanding the contours of memory in the United States. Kammen further argues that discourses of progress are often also discourses of amnesia, or at least deeply selective memory. All pasts that conflict with the larger ideology of progress are shunted aside (Kammen, Mystic Chords, 13, 704).
72. The fire is convincing enough that nearly all the visitors we observed approached it and held out their hands to determine whether or not it was giving off any heat. The fire is made compelling through a combination of technological devices. The wood looks partially burned, the light from the fire flickers realistically, and the river home is filled with soft, crackling sounds.
73. Tompkins, West of Everything, 194.
74. Kammen, Mystic Chords, 13.
75. Anderson and Domosh, “North American,” 126.
76. John Belohlavek, “Race, Progress, and Destiny: Caleb Cushing and the Quest for American Empire,” Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism, ed. Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris (Arlington: University of Texas Press, 1997), 24.
77. Anderson and Domosh, “North American,” 126.
78. Anderson and Domosh, “North American,” 126.
79. See Gallagher, “Memory,” 307–8; See also Kammen, Mystic Chords, 704.
80. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth. 69.
81. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 70.