May 28, 2009
1909 exhibition’s darker side explored in the Burke’s ‘A-Y-P: Indigenous Voices Reply’
In August of 1909, during the third month of the immensely popular Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Mrs. Caroline McGilvra Burke decided to give a tea for members of the Congress of Indian Educators and other dignitaries, then visiting Seattle.
For the afternoon, Burke — whose 1962 estate gift in memory of her husband, Thomas Burke, began the modern Burke Museum — and friends wore festive Native American dress. Two Navajo girls were brought from Fort Defiance Indian School in Arizona to demonstrate weaving for the visitors. Ironically, the Native American girls wore the late-Victorian dresses required by their boarding school.
Local press covered the event. The Seattle Times headline blared “INDIANS BREAK INTO HIGH SOCIETY.” The sub-headline added with faux astonishment: “Blanketed Warriors and Students of Schools Ride Automobiles to Mrs. Thomas Burke’s Residence.”
A photo of Caroline Burke and her costumed guests is part of the Burke Museum’s newest exhibit, A-Y-P: Indigenous Voices Reply, which opens May 30 (with a host of opening day events: learn more at http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/ayp/events.php) and runs through Nov. 29, at the museum.
The duality of the tea party is hard to miss — an apparently sincere intent in 1909 to celebrate Native American culture on the one hand, and a tone of patronization, even latent racism, on the other. Indians riding in cars and attending teas — how quaint!
“The thing is, the Burkes were very progressive people for their era,” said Robin Wright, Burke curator of Native American art, who created the exhibit with Deana Dartt-Newton, the museum’s new curator of Native American ethnography. “They both spoke at the Indian Congress and championed Indian people. And yet to our 21st century eyes it’s sort of shocking what they said — ‘Look what happens when you educate these Indians and they become productive members of society, like our servants.'”
That insensitivity was mild compared with the sensations of the AYPE’s famous Pay Streak, a popular attraction that ran from 40th Street to the shores of Lake Union. There, among other attractions two exhibits styled as realistic “villages” purported to show visitors the behaviors of Eskimos, mostly from Alaska, and the Igorot mountain people of the Philippines.
The performers in these villages were treated more like zoo specimens than men and women. The Eskimos were required to play leap frog, said Dartt-Newton “basically to represent the frivolity of ‘untamed’ native life,” and others sported trimmed hair styles and performed various tasks “to show the virtues of a civilized life.”
She said, “It was so patronizing. Nobody was asking Native people what they wanted, all the decisions were made for them as if they were children.” She added, “Native people were portrayed as another exploitable resource in the untamed Northwest and Pacific.”
This cultural disconnect lies at the heart of A-Y-P: Indigenous Voices Reply, and intentionally so.
The curators said they set out with two basic goals. The first, said Wright, was to examine how indigenous people were displayed and treated at the fair and ask how that has changed over the intervening century.
The second, crucial part was to present work by current Native artists — by way of reply to the long-ago AYPE exploitation. “That Native people have opportunities to reply publically to these types of stereotypical, pervasive images of Native life is, I think, the most important thing about this exhibit,” Dartt-Newton said.
With the help of an advisory committee that included on- and off-campus members of area tribes, the curators put out a request for submissions and received about 30 in return. Of those, they chose 16 works. Learn more about the artists and their works at http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/ayp/artists.php.
Some of the artists got inspiration and ideas from objects in the Burke’s existing ethnology collection. Tlingit artist Garrett Jackson said he was inspired by the items his own great-grandfather, Lt. George T. Emmons, collected during those days that were exhibited at the AYPE and later became a foundation for the Burke’s ethnology collection.
Artist MaryLou Slaughter, a descendant of Chief Seattle and his first wife and a member of the Duwamish tribe, wove a hat inspired by the one held by her ancestor in his famous portrait. Artist Nicholas Galanin of the Tlingit tribe appropriated a video from the Burke itself of 25,000 research slides taken by then-curators Bill Holm and Wright. He stripped the video of credits and “re-appropriated” it right back to the Burke under the title, Who We Are.
Other participating artists are: Tony Ayala (Chumash), Phillip John Charette Aarnaquq (Yup’ik), Michael Halady (Duwamish), Anna Hoover (Aleut), DeAnn Sackman-Jacobson (Duwamish), Swil Kanim (Lummi), Sonya Kelliher–Combs (Athabascan/Inupiaq/European), Tima Link (Santa Barbara Chumash), Justin McCarthy (Yup’ik), David Neel (Kwagiutl), Tanis S’eiltin (Tlingit), Preston Singletary (Tlingit/Filipino/European) and Matika Wilbur (Swinomish/Tulalip).
And here’s another scene from 1909, as reported by the press of the day. Myrtle Seattle, Chief Seattle’s granddaughter, was invited to the home of Mrs. R.A. Ballinger, wife of the then Secretary of the Interior, during the AYPE — not as a guest but to serve what the papers called “an appetizing and up-to-date lunch” to Ballinger and her friends.
“It was a long step toward civilization from the crude, coarse food dished up to the warrior who gave the city its name,” the Times reported afterward. “Myrtle and her dusky classmates demonstrated how well they are taught in the United States Indian schools the secrets of preparing wholesome and appetizing meals.”
Such articles and more from 1909 will be available for viewing, as well as others on Native American issues from as recent as 2009. Visitors will be asked to leave comments on the question, “Do you think things have changed?”
A-Y-P: Indigenous Voices Reply is not simply a contrite revisiting of past sins; it’s also an open invitation to the viewers to decide for themselves how much or little attitudes toward Native Americans and others have changed over the last 100 years.
Co-curator Dartt-Newton, herself a member of the Chumash tribe, has strong feelings of her own. “One thing’s for sure. While certain attitudes have changed, some things have not. We are not at a place of compete reconciliation … Native people still have to fight against repressive and racist ideologies.”
That’s why she says the contemporary pieces are such a powerful statement in A-Y-P: Indigenous Voices Reply —”Because in contrast to 1909, today Native peoples are asked to speak for themselves — to represent their art and culture in ways that speak to what’s important to them.
“Though we have no way of knowing what Native people thought or said of the A-Y-P Exposition — because no one was asking, no one was reporting — one hundred years later we hear them speaking — not of oppression, but of resistance, revival and resurgence.”
