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The Oregon Collaborative Conference Keynote Address
Cheryl A. Metoyer, Ph.D.
Chief Academic Affairs Officer, Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation
Tamastslikt Cultural Institute
Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation
October 22, 2004
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The Beauty of It All
Introduction
Good morning to all of you. It is a privilege to be here in this beautiful Tamastslikt Cultural Institute. Thank you, Alyce Sadongei and the Arizona State Museum and State Library for honoring me with the invitation to speak this morning. I am grateful and delighted to be here.
When Alyce emailed me with the invitation to speak, she asked me to prepare an inspirational address for all of you engaged in collaboration and resource sharing among tribal archives, libraries and museums. Hmmmmm. That was a first for me. So, I won’t be speaking about planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating or budgeting for tribal libraries, archives or museums.
The morning following my talk with Alyce, while walking on the beach, I began to think about what I might say to you. Well, the ocean was so blue, the waves so powerful, and the seagulls so playful, that I was just overcome with the beauty of it all. I was in awe! My mind began to whirl as I considered tribal libraries, archives and museums—what they have in common, what they represent and why they exist at all. During this reverie, I looked down and spied this little treasure. It is called a Wavy Top Turban Shell. My nieces love these and call them little houses. It is a simple, pearly, small gem of beauty and it looks like a little house---a miniature dwelling place. Indeed, it was a home for a snail and later on the shore, a home for a tiny creature—the hermit crab. This Wavy Top Turban Shell is found anywhere from Pt. Conception to Baja California. I held it and thought about shelters—houses, hogans, tents, wigwams, tipis, and longhouses. I thought about how we often translate the words “library” “archives” “museum” “cultural center” into the Native language(s) equivalent of “house of wisdom.”
I then recalled a discussion that occurred last month at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The D’Arcy McNickel Center for American Indian History and the CIC American Indian Studies Consortium, sponsored their Third Annual National Research Conference entitled, “Native Peoples and Museums: Building Reciprocal Relationships for the Twenty-first Century. ” The presentations concerned museums in relation to historical societies, the university, and the public. The perspective was somewhat different from that generally shared by information professionals, when we talk among ourselves. I will come back to this conference a little later.
So, there I was on the beach—thinking about the natural beauty of the place, the silence, this little shell, and the Newberry discussions. At that moment, it all came together. It was all so beautiful. I decided that I wanted to wonder and ponder some more about beauty: What makes a thing beautiful? Do we, as librarians, archivists, and museum staff members engage in beautiful work and if so, why? The work we do is challenging, exhausting, frustrating and sometimes rewarding. But is it indeed beautiful, I wondered?
Let me return to Chicago and the Newberry Conference. The audience consisted of scholars, faculty, members of the Chicago Indian community, graduate students, and members of historical societies, museum directors and curators, and librarians. I presented a case study of the development of the Pequot Society gallery of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. During the questioning session, I participated in a discussion, the gist of which went something like this:
Is it not true that museums and libraries are really icons of colonization? These institutions, by their very nature, objectify Native people and perpetuate stereotypes. Did pre-contact indigenous people really have anything comparable to museums, or archives or libraries? In building libraries, archives and museums, aren’t the tribes validating and perpetuating the symbols of their colonization and subjugation---thereby negating their histories before contact?
I was a little taken aback. It had been a long time since I had pondered the effects of cultural imperialism in this way. It had been a long time since I had heard tribal libraries, archives and museums characterized in any way other than positive. After all, we here assume that tribal libraries, archives and museums are inherently good. These were very provocative statements, and they generated serious food for thought. While I did not purport to speak for all the tribes, I did have some ideas to bring to that discussion.
Libraries, museums and archives as institutions, or as buildings, in the Western/European sense, did not exist in pre-contact tribal communities. However, their functions, broadly interpreted, as means of preserving our language, memory and lifeways were certainly present. I believe that we have creatively, skillfully, successfully and beautifully used these institutional frameworks to tell our stories in our ways, by providing accurate information coupled with brilliant imagination.
The conversation continued and I learned more and more. I learned that my good friend and colleague, Dr. Ray Fogelson, from the University of Chicago, teaches a course entitled, “The Anthropology of Museums” in which he looks at various organizational and ideological features of museums---all types from an international perspective. The students learn about Israeli Settlement Museums, tribal museums, museums of art, museums of science and industry and more. I learned about the wonderful Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art and the breathtaking modern exhibits at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis.
The discussion provoked intriguing debate. Issues concerning sovereignty, objectification, colonization, the role of federal and state funds in the development of tribal libraries, archives and museums, all found their way into the give and take of this session.
I listened carefully and came home thinking, “be that as it may, we do good, important and beautiful work in our tribal libraries, archives and museums.” A few days later, Alyce emailed me about this conference. As I said, I walked the beach with beauty everywhere, including on my mind. So in that spirit, here are some thoughts about beauty and why it is important to remember and consider the beauty of it all.
When a person walks into our tribal libraries, archives or museums they encounter a realm of beauty. What do we know about the perception of beauty? Beauty is powerful. People can question or doubt almost anything, except beauty. It cannot be doubted because it is a transcendental property of “being” itself.
It is a great teacher (as stipulated by many wisdom traditions). Beauty has the power to transform the heart and generate gratitude---deep gratitude. It needs no justification because it exists for its own sake.
Beauty is irresistible though it may not always be pretty. Our histories, for example, are stories rife with pain. There is nothing pretty about the massacres, removals, and de-humanization of our people. But there is great beauty in our survival, our ability to prosper and our determination to tell these very painful stories and preserve them in all their forms of expression, in our libraries, museums and archives. And there is beauty in our proclivity to laugh a lot in spite of it all.
It seems to me that what we do in our libraries, archives and museums is to show the world that there is beauty hidden in the darkness of colonization. There are treasures embedded in tribal expressions of culture, be they our ceremonies and rituals, languages, the daunting physical beauty of our reservation lands, our glorious beadwork, wampum belts, winter counts, star knowledge, carvings, ---our centuries old practices of community---how we cook, how we feast, how we mourn, how we celebrate. These are treasures of enormous beauty and each time we answer a reference question, plan and implement an exhibit, plumb the recesses of our tribal archives for accuracy and authenticity, we stop the “uglification” that colonization brought to us.
The beauty of our charge as librarians, archivists and museum staff consists in saying to the world, “Hey look at this---really look at this and listen to us. We have beautiful and wonderful gifts to share with you.”
Abraham Heschel, the brilliant Jewish Rabbi, wrote, “ ….one of the beauties of the human spirit is that we appreciate what we share, we do no appreciate what we receive.” (Heschel, Abraham. I Asked for Wonder, ed. by Samuel Dresner. NY: Crossroads, 1983, p. 62).
We may be sharing the graceful lines of Marvin Oliver’s works, the stories of Gloria Webster, the magnificence of our totems, the dignity sleeping in Alan Houser’s sculptures, the elegance of Northwest Coast carving, the scholarship of Professor Alfonso Ortiz, the grittiness of Gregg Sarris’s novels, the humor generated by Sherman Alexi’s world view, the drum beat of Redbone, the lilting voice of Joanne Shenandoah, the soothing sounds of Carlos Nakai, the heart wrenching, elucidating research of Professor Brenda Child, evident in her studies of boarding school sorrows, the insightfulness of our students’ documentary films in the UW Native Voices Program, the comfortable, homey-ness of Luci Tapahonso’s poetry--- poetry that makes me want to sit once again, at my mother’s crummy, Formica kitchen table, and drink cups of non-gourmet Folgers coffee, from a chipped cup. I could go on and on, over many centuries, across many tribes, about many artists and throughout Great Turtle Island. I know each of you could add to this list.
There is gorgeous breadth and depth and beauty in what we create, cherish, handle, discover, preserve, study, organize, assess, and share. This is what we do, isn’t it? There is no patchwork here. In our many threads of varied tribal traditions, there is a common thread of beauty through it all. As tribal librarians, archivists, and museum staff members, we promote, educate and preserve not only the item, the object, the story, the song, but the spaces in between---the silence that gives definition and an appropriate dignity to the item, the object, the story, the song, the dance. We understand this—or at least we should. We just need to not get too far away from the inherent beauty of what we do, and why we do it.
When our patrons, guests, clientele or visitors leave our libraries, archives and museums—I would like them to reflect this sentiment:
“Thank you for showing me something that I could never have come to on my own: and thank you for trusting me enough to think that I would understand this, that I would get it!” (Rolheiser, Ron. Beauty as God’s Language. The Tidings, Sept. 17, 2004, p.16).
Our privilege, our task then, is to use our libraries, archives and museums to share the beauty and to protect the integrity of our traditions. I would like us to believe in the sensitivity and intelligence of our visitors. They are learning new things about us. I want us to believe deeply and to trust that someday they will fully understand---That they will join us as we celebrate our beautiful resiliency.
After all, we know through our give aways that if something is of beauty, giving it away only increases its beauty. Thank you for letting me give you my thoughts this morning.
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