Chip Colwell

"A fascinating account of both the historical and current struggle of Native Americans to recover sacred objects that have been plundered and sold to museums. Museum curator and anthropologist Chip Colwell asks the all-important question: Who owns the past? Museums that care for the objects of history or the communities whose ancestors made them?"--Provided by the publisher.

Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture

Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits

How humans became so dependent on things and how this need has grown dangerously out of control. Over three million years ago, our ancient ancestors realized that rocks could be broken into sharp-edged objects for slicing meat, making the first knives. This discovery resulted in a good meal, and eventually changed the fate of our species and our planet. With So Much Stuff, archaeologist Chip Colwell sets out to investigate why humankind went from self-sufficient primates to nonstop shoppers, from needing nothing to needing everything. Along the way, he uncovers spectacular and strange points around the world—an Italian cave with the world’s first known painted art, a Hong Kong skyscraper where a priestess channels the gods, and a mountain of trash that rivals the Statue of Liberty. Through these examples, Colwell shows how humanity took three leaps that led to stuff becoming inseparable from our lives, inspiring a love affair with things that may lead to our downfall. Now, as landfills brim and oceans drown in trash, Colwell issues a timely call to reevaluate our relationship with the things that both created and threaten to undo our overstuffed planet.

How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything

So Much Stuff

John Stephen Colwell

Introduction -- Resistance: war gods -- Only after night fall -- Keepers of the sky -- Magic relief -- Tribal resolution -- All things will eat themselves up -- This far away -- Regret: a scalp from Sand Creek -- I have come to kill Indians -- The Bones Bill -- We are going back home -- Indian trophies -- Ac.35b -- A wound of the soul -- Reluctance: killer whale flotilla robe -- Masterless things -- Chief Shakes -- Johnson v. Chilkat Indian Village -- Cranes' last stand -- The weight was heavy -- Our culture is not dying -- Respect: Calusa skulls -- The hardest cases -- Long since completely disappeared -- Unidentifiable -- Their place of understanding -- Timeless limbo -- Before we just gave up -- Conclusion

In recent years, archaeologists and Native American communities have struggled to find common ground even though more than a century ago a man of Seneca descent raised on New York’s Cattaraugus Reservation, Arthur C. Parker, joined the ranks of professional archaeology. Until now, Parker’s life and legacy as the first Native American archaeologist have been neither closely studied nor widely recognized. At a time when heated debates about the control of Native American heritage have come to dominate archaeology, Parker’s experiences form a singular lens to view the field’s tangled history and current predicaments with Indigenous peoples. In Inheriting the Past, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh examines Parker’s winding career path and asks why it has taken generations for Native peoples to follow in his footsteps. Closely tracing Parker’s life through extensive archival research, Colwell-Chanthaphonh explores how Parker crafted a professional identity and negotiated dilemmas arising from questions of privilege, ownership, authorship, and public participation. How Parker, as well as the discipline more broadly, chose to address the conflict between Native American rights and the pursuit of scientific discovery ultimately helped form archaeology’s moral community. Parker’s rise in archaeology just as the field was taking shape demonstrates that Native Americans could have found a place in the scholarly pursuit of the past years ago and altered its trajectory. Instead, it has taken more than a century to articulate the promise of an Indigenous archaeology—an archaeological practice carried out by, for, and with Native peoples. As the current generation of researchers explores new possibilities of inclusiveness, Parker’s struggles and successes serve as a singular reference point to reflect on archaeology’s history and its future.

The Making of Arthur C. Parker and Indigenous Archaeology

Inheriting the Past

Lindsay M. Montgomery

Between 1893 and 1903, Jesse H. Bratley worked in Indian schools across five reservations in the American West. As a teacher Bratley was charged with forcibly assimilating Native Americans through education. Although tasked with eradicating their culture, Bratley became entranced by it—collecting artifacts and taking glass plate photographs to document the Native America he encountered. Today, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s Jesse H. Bratley Collection consists of nearly 500 photographs and 1,000 pottery and basketry pieces, beadwork, weapons, toys, musical instruments, and other objects traced to the S’Klallam, Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Havasupai, Hopi, and Seminole peoples. This visual and material archive serves as a lens through which to view a key moment in US history—when Native Americans were sequestered onto reservation lands, forced into unfamiliar labor economies, and attacked for their religious practices. Education, the government hoped, would be the final tool to permanently transform Indigenous bodies through moral instruction in Western dress, foodways, and living habits. Yet Lindsay Montgomery and Chip Colwell posit that Bratley’s collection constitutes “objects of survivance”—things and images that testify not to destruction and loss but to resistance and survival. Interwoven with documents and interviews, Objects of Survivance illuminates how the US government sought to control Native Americans and how Indigenous peoples endured in the face of such oppression. Rejecting the narrative that such objects preserve dying Native cultures, Objects of Survivance reframes the Bratley Collection, showing how tribal members have reconnected to these items, embracing them as part of their past and reclaiming them as part of their contemporary identities. This unique visual and material record of the early American Indian school experience and story of tribal perseverance will be of value to anyone interested in US history, Native American studies, and social justice. Co-published with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science

Chip Colwell

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