5
Current Anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
᭧ 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4501-0001$3.00
Looking Several Ways
Anthropology and Native
Heritage in Alaska
by James Clifford
The ambivalent legacy of anthropologists’ relations with local
communities presents contemporary researchers with both obstacles
and opportunities. No longer justifiable by assumptions of
free scientific access and interpersonal rapport, research increasingly
calls for explicit contract agreements and negotiated reciprocities.
The complex, unfinished colonial entanglements of anthropology
and Native communities are being undone and
rewoven, and even the most severe indigenous critics of anthropology
recognize the potential for alliances when they are based
on shared resources, repositioned indigenous and academic authorities,
and relations of genuine respect. This essay probes the
possibilities and limits of collaborative work, focusing on recent
Native heritage exhibitions in south-central and southwestern
Alaska. It also discusses the cultural politics of identity and tradition,
stressing social processes of articulation, performance,
and translation.
james clifford is Professor of History of Consciousness at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding director of
the university’s Center for Cultural Studies (Santa Cruz, CA
95064, U.S.A. [jcliff@ucsc.edu]). Born in 1945, he was educated at
Haverford College (A.B., 1967), Stanford University (M.A., 1968),
and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1977). Among his publications
are Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian
World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), (edited
with George Marcus) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics
of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986),
The Predicament of Culture: 20th-Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), and
Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1998). The present paper was
submitted 25 iii 03 and accepted 30 vii 03.
Gone are the days when cultural anthropologists could,
without contradiction, present “the Native point of
view,” when archaeologists and physical anthropologists
excavated tribal remains without local permission, when
linguists collected data on indigenous languages without
feeling pressure to return the results in accessible form.
Scholarly outsiders now find themselves barred from access
to research sites, met with new or newly public
suspicion. Indeed, “the anthropologist”—broadly and
sometimes stereotypically defined—has become a negative
alter ego in contemporary indigenous discourse,
invoked as the epitome of arrogant, intrusive colonial
authority.1
The history of anthropological relations with local
communities includes many examples of insensitive
data and artifact collection. These, combined with general
assumptions of scientific authority, are understood
as modes of colonial domination from the other side of
a structural power imbalance, and, as histories such as
David Hurst Thomas’s Skull Wars (2000) amply document,
the resentment is often justified. At the same
time, the sweeping condemnations of (or jokes at the
expense of) anthropologists by indigenous peoples are
often combined with generous words for individuals
whose work has been based on reciprocity, respect, and
cooperation (see, e.g., Deloria 1997:210; Hereniko 2000:
90).2
And anthropological texts are frequently reappropriated
in Native discourses, invoked in revivals of tradition.
Indeed, the legacy of scientific research done in
colonial situations is ambiguous and open-ended. In Malekula,
Vanuatu, A. B. Deacon’s research from the 1920s
is recycled in contemporary kastom discourses (Larcom
1982, Curtis 2003). In California, the “salvage” anthropology
and linguistics of the A. L. Kroeber/Mary Haas
tradition at Berkeley is an invaluable resource for tribal
heritage activities. If Kroeber is currently condemned for
insensitively sending Ishi’s brain to the Smithsonian collection
of Alesˇ Hrdlicˇka or for pronouncing “death sentences,”
in his authoritative Handbook of the Indians
of California (1925), on tribes now struggling for recognition,
he is also gratefully remembered by Yurok elders
for loyal friendships and for recording precious lore. His
extensive, carefully researched court testimony in the
1950s on behalf of Native claims prefigures today’s advocacy
roles (see Buckley 1996:294–95; Field 1999).3
This legacy presents contemporary researchers—Native,
non-Native, “insider,” “outsider,” “halfie,” “diasporic”—with
both obstacles and opportunities. Les Field
1. The most famous salvo is, of course, chapter 4 of Vine Deloria
Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969)—the book title borrowed from
that of a Floyd Westerman album, which includes the wickedly
sardonic “Here Come the Anthros.” See also Trask (1991), Smith
(1999), and, in a more humorous vein, Hughte (1994).
2. Deloria (pp. 218–19) argues that for Amerindians assessments of
personal ethics and integrity far outweigh professional qualifications
in determining hospitality and cooperation in research. Thus,
he insists, the existence of individual friendships and reciprocities
should not be taken as evidence that structural power relations and
colonial baggage have been transcended.
3. Kroeber’s extensive notes for his testimony are in the Bancroft
Library.
6 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
(1999) sees an unfinished history of “complicities and
collaborations.” Fundamentally altered by the political
mobilization of Native communities, research can no
longer be justified by assumptions of free scientific access
and interpersonal rapport. Explicit contract agreements
and negotiated reciprocities are increasingly the
norm. In postindependence Vanuatu, for example, anthropology
and archaeology were formally banned for a
decade. Now research is permitted only when host communities
agree and when the foreign researcher collaborates
with a local “filwoka” doing heritage work for the
Vanuatu Cultural Centre (Bolton 1999, Curtis 2003). In
some contexts, anthropologists find themselves recruited
for land-claims litigation, archaeologists for local
heritage projects, linguists for language reclamation. In
others, fieldwork is forbidden or subject to disabling restrictions.
Faced with these new, politicized relations,
scholars may regret a loss of “scientific freedom”—forgetting
the structural power that was formerly a guarantee
of free access and relative safety and ignoring the
many implicit limits and accommodations that have always
been part of field research. (Many scientists once
felt authorized to remove human remains, without consent,
from graves in Native communities. If this is now
beyond the professional pale, it is the result of ethical
and political constraints on scientific freedom.) As Native
intellectuals and activists challenge academic authority,
lines can harden: the current “Kennewick Man”/
“Ancient One” struggle for control of an ancient
skeleton is a notorious case in which unbending “native”
and “scientific” positions face off in court (Thomas
2000). Even where relations are less polarized, it has become
clear that local communities need to be able to
say no, unambiguously, as a precondition for negotiating
more equitable and respectful collaborations. In practice,
the complex, unfinished colonial entanglements of anthropology
and Native communities are being undone
and rewoven, and even the most severe indigenous critics
of anthropology recognize the potential for alliances
when they are based on shared resources, repositioned
indigenous and academic authorities, and relations of
genuine respect.4
This essay probes the possibilities and limits of collaborative
work, focusing on a recent Native heritage
exhibition in southwestern Alaska: Looking Both Ways.
I discuss the project’s contributors, conditions of production,
and occasions of reception primarily through a
contextualized reading of its remarkable catalogue,
Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the Alutiiq
People, edited by Aron Crowell, Amy Steffian, and Gordon
Pullar (2001). I was able to view the exhibition,
4. Deloria (2000:xvi) writes, in the Kennewick context, “Nevertheless,
in most areas, scholars and Indians have worked to discover
as much as possible about newly discovered remains. When scholars
have gone directly to the tribes involved, much progress has
been made.” Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999:15, 17) argues for “reciprocity
and feedback” in a range of current “bicultural,” “partnership,”
and “multi-disciplinary” research practices. Field (1999) discusses
current possibilities and constraints in research alliances,
and his CA commentators offer useful complications.
which was linked with a local Alutiiq cultural festival
(Tamamta Katurlluta, August 31, 2002) in one of its Alaskan
venues.5
I also discuss, more briefly, Ann FienupRiordan’s
pioneering collaborative work with Yupiit and
the recently opened Alaska Native Heritage Center in
Anchorage. The goal is not a complete survey of heritage
activity in the region but an evocation of changing Alaskan
Native identity politics touching on several different
practices of cultural revival, translation, and alliance.
Heritage is self-conscious tradition, what Fienup-Riordan
(2000:167) calls “conscious culture,” performed in
old and new public contexts and asserted against historical
experiences of loss. It responds to demands that
originate both inside and outside indigenous communities,
mediating new powers and attachments: relations
with the land, among local groups, with the state, and
with transnational forces. In contemporary Alaska, “Native”
identifications have been empowered by global and
regional movements of cultural resurgence and political
contestation. They have also been channeled and intensified
by state policies, particularly the Alaska Native
Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA) and its after-
math.6
With the passage of this legislation, for the first
time, perhaps, it paid to be Native. The land-claims
movements of the 1960s and the formation of the Alaska
5. The festival was organized by members of the Alutiiq communities
in Nanwalek, Port Graham, and Seldovia, working closely
with staff at the Pratt Museum, Homer, Alaska, where the exhibition
was installed. I also visited briefly in the village of Nanwalek.
While my perspective on the project was greatly enriched by these
encounters, my analysis remains essentially that of a visitor, a consumer
and critic of public performances and texts. The many limitations
and perhaps a few strengths of this outsider position will,
no doubt, be evident. The fact that I was unable to visit the Alutiiq
Museum and Archaeological Repository in Kodiak means that an
important dimension of the story is underdeveloped. Aron Crowell’s
“Dynamics of Indigenous Collaboration in Alaska,” delivered
at Berkeley in spring 2002, piqued my interest. He later introduced
me to Homer and Nanwalek, and I particularly thank him, along
with my gracious Nanwalek hosts, James and Carol Kvasnikoff. In
preparing this essay I have consulted with Crowell and Amy Steffian
primarily to verify matters of fact. Helpful comments on earlier
drafts have been provided by Gordon Pullar, Sven Haakanson Jr.,
Ann Fienup-Riordan, Nicholas Thomas, and Anna Tsing. The specific
emphases and interpretations are, of course, my responsibility.
6. ANCSA was a political compromise of several different agendas:
Native land-claims agitation and a new political coalition (the
Alaska Federation of Natives), the need of transnational corporations
to build a pipeline across the state for oil recently discovered
in Prudhoe Bay, and the desire of state and federal governments to
articulate a new Native policy in the wake of the failed “termination
period” of the 1950s and ’60s—a policy that could definitively
settle aboriginal claims, giving Native groups a stake in economic
development within a capitalist context while avoiding
welfare and trusteeship responsibilities. The act awarded 44 million
acres of land and nearly $1 billion to 13 regional Native corporations
and 205 village corporations. Eligible Native shareholders had to
show a 25% blood quantum, and participation was limited to individuals
born before the date of the legislation. Unique in U.S.
Native policy, ANCSA reflects the specific history of Native-government
relations in Alaska, which lacks a reservation system and
government trusteeship over tribal lands as practiced in the lower
48 states. It has served as a model for Inuit “self-determination”
in Quebec, with ambivalent consequences similar to those in
Alaska, including the emergence of a Native corporate elite (Mitchell
1996, Skinner 1997, Dombrowski 2002).
clifford Looking Several Ways F 7
Fig. 1. Distribution of native languages in Alaska.
Federation of Natives (AFN) made a self-determination
politics based on Pan-Alaskan alliances possible. Nurtured
by strengthening “circumpolar” and “Fourth
World” connections, large-scale “tribal” or “national”
identifications emerged, supplementing more local village
or kin-based affiliations. Heritage preservation and
performance have been an integral part of these changing
Native articulations. The result has been more formally
articulated notions of “culture” or “tradition” appropriate
to changing indigenous senses of self.
For example, the people who now call themselves
“Alutiiq” (and sometimes also “Sugpiaq”) live in villages
and towns on Kodiak Island, on the southern coast of
the Alaska Peninsula, on the Kenai Peninsula, on Prince
William Sound, and in urban Anchorage (figs. 1 and 2).
Their somewhat uncertain status as a coherent entity in
1971 is indicated by the fact that Alutiit are dispersed
among three of the ANCSA regional corporations. In fact,
many individuals rediscovered or renewed their sense of
“Native” identity in the process of ANCSA enrollment.
Their collective history had been one of intense disruption
and trauma: the arrival of the Russians in the late
eighteenth century, bringing labor exploitation, massacres,
and epidemics; United States colonization after
1867, with missionaries, boarding schools, and intense
military presence during World War II; devastation and
displacement by a series of seismic disasters and the
Exxon Valdez oil spill. While a great deal of local tradition
had been lost or buried, there were surviving subsistence
communities, kinship networks, a thriving Native
religion (syncretic Russian Orthodoxy), and a
significant, if dwindling, number of individuals who
could speak Sug’stun, the Eskimoan language indigenous
to the region. Under the impetus of the identity politics
sweeping Alaska, affiliations partially consolidated by
ANCSA, people were inspired to research, reclaim, and
transmit their “Alutiiq” heritage (see Pullar 1992 and
Mason 2002).
Throughout Native Alaska, new forms of cultural/artistic
production have been devised, along with new alliances
of Native and non-Native interests and new sites
of performance and consumption. Today these range
from regional elders’ conferences and syncretic revivals
of midwinter dancing to language classes, carving and
boat-building workshops, tribal museums, “native
tours,” and model villages for cruise-ship visitors. New
8 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
Fig. 2. Alutiiq villages (adapted from Damas 1984:198).
cohorts of ethnically defined entrepreneurs, community
leaders, and cultural brokers have emerged. Older forms
of social, political, and religious authority are simultaneously
recognized and transformed, selectively translated
in changing situations. How these practices take
hold in local contexts varies considerably, depending on
demographics and ecology, the timing and force of colonial
and neocolonial disruptions, possibilities and pressures
for resource extraction, and ongoing struggles over
subsistence. Works like Looking Both Ways and the
other heritage projects discussed below are specific coproductions
in a complex social/economic/cultural conjuncture
that both governs and empowers Native life.
Broadly defined, heritage work includes oral-historical
research, cultural evocation and explanation (exhibits,
festivals, publications, films, tourist sites), language description
and pedagogy, community-based archaeology,
art production, marketing, and criticism. Of course, such
projects are only one aspect of indigenous self-determination
politics today. Heritage is not a substitute for land
claims, struggles over subsistence rights, development,
educational, and health projects, defense of sacred sites,
and repatriation of human remains or stolen artifacts,
but it is closely connected to all these struggles. What
counts as “tradition” is never politically neutral (Jolly
1992, Briggs 1996, Clifford 2000, Phillips and Schochet
2004), and the work of cultural retrieval, display, and
performance plays a necessary role in current movements
around identity and recognition. This essay works
to keep in view multiple producers and consumers of
Native heritage, stressing the constitutive processes of
political articulation, contingent performance, and partial
translation.
Heritage projects participate in a range of public
spheres, acting within and between Native communities
as sites of mobilization and pride, sources of intergenerational
inspiration and education, ways to reconnect
with the past and to say to others: “We exist,” “We have
deep roots here,” “We are different.” This kind of cultural
politics is not without ambiguities and dangers (see
Hewison 1987, Harvey 1990, Walsh 1992). Heritage can
be a form of self-marketing, responding to the demands
of a multicultural political economy that contains and
manages inequalities. Sustaining local traditions does
not guarantee economic and social justice; claiming cultural
identity can be a palliative or compensation rather
than part of a more systematic shift of power. In postindustrial
contexts heritage has been criticized as a form
of depoliticized, commodified nostalgia—ersatz tradition.
While such criticisms tend to oversimplify the politics
of localism, as Raphael Samuel (1994) has argued,
pressures for cultural objectification and commodification
are indeed often at work in contemporary heritage
projects. But to conclude with a moral/political “bottom
clifford Looking Several Ways F 9
line” of objectification and commodification is to miss
a great deal of the local, regional, national, and international
meaning activated by heritage work.7
The politics of identity and heritage are indeed constrained
and empowered by today’s more flexible forms
of capitalist marketing, communication, and government.
While recognizing these pressures it is crucial to
distinguish different temporalities and scales (Tsing
2000) of political articulation (local, regional, national,
international), performativity (linguistic, familial, religious,
pedagogic, touristic), and translation (intergenerational,
cross-cultural, conservative, innovative). Global
cultural and economic forces are localized and to a degree
critically inflected through these processes. Indeed, the
connections affirmed in Native heritage projects—with
land, with elders, with religious affiliations, with ancient,
unevenly changing practices—can be substantial,
not “invented” or merely simulacral. And for indigenous
people, long marginalized or made to disappear, physically
and ideologically, to say “We exist” in performances
and publications is a powerful political act. In the
past several decades, at regional and international scales,
an increasing indigenous presence has been felt in many
settler-colonial and national contexts. This pre´sence indige`ne
is reminiscent of the Pre´sence Africaine movement
of the early 1950s, an assertion of cultural identity
inseparable from political self-determination. Today’s indigenous
movements, like earlier anticolonial mobilizations,
complicate dichotomous, arguably Eurocentric
conceptions of “cultural” versus “political” or “economic”
agency.8
Of course, the conditions of “self-determination,” of
“sovereignty” are different a half-century after the great
wave of postwar national liberation movements. Under
conditions of globalization, self-determination is less a
matter of independence and more a practice of managing
interdependence, inflecting uneven power relations,
finding room for maneuver (Clifford 2001). Subaltern
strategies today are flexible and adapted to specific post/neocolonial,
globally interconnected contexts. This is
not an entirely new predicament: indigenous movements
have always had to make the best of bad political-economic
situations. In a relatively liberal settler-colonial
milieu such as contemporary Alaska—where Native
groups, a real political presence, control significant land
7. This essay extends an earlier discussion of the “heritage debates”
and their application (in the work of Kevin Walsh and David Harvey)
to transnational contexts (Clifford 1997:213–19). How are we to
understand the paradoxically globalizing and differentiating functions
of widespread claims to “culture” and “identity” (Friedman
1994, Dominguez 1994, Wilk 1995)? I have argued that the paradox
should not be reduced to an effect of globalizing or postmodern
power structures (Clifford 2000). Something excessive is going on
in these diverse, proliferating movements. Hodder (1999:148–77)
clearly portrays the complex determinations at issue.
8. A strong argument in this vein was provided by the Kanak independence
leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou (1996), who insisted on an
organic connection between Melanesian heritage affirmations and
a broad range of self-determination struggles. On recent arguments
that portray “merely cultural” movements as divorced from the
“real politics” of structural transformation, see Judith Butler’s
(1998) riposte.
and resources—basic power imbalances persist. The
spaces opened for Native expansion and initiative are
circumscribed, and key conditions attached to the apparently
generous ANCSA settlements can be shown to
serve dominant interests (Dombrowski 2002). At the
same time, the social and cultural mobilizations now
partially articulated with state and corporate multiculturalism
in Alaska predate and potentially overflow the
prevailing structures of government. Heritage work, to
the extent that it selectively preserves and updates cultural
traditions and relations to place, can be part of a
social process that strengthens indigenous claims to deep
roots—to a status beyond that of another minority or
local interest group. My discussion of Looking Both
Ways makes this guarded positive claim. The long-term
political and economic effects of recent Alutiiq cultural
mobilizations remain to be seen, but the outcome will
necessarily be compromised and uneven.
In the next section I introduce the Looking Both Ways
project and juxtapose it with other heritage exhibitions
and publications that have responded to the changing
Native situation in Alaska. Having presented a range of
experiences, I return to the troubling question of how
Native presence in the post-ANCSA period should be
historicized. The subsequent section focuses on the Alutiiq
project’s portrayal of an emergent multi-accented
history and identity. In a concluding discussion I return
to the limits and possibilities of collaborative heritage
work for anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists
forging new relationships with Native communities.
Native Presence: Recent Heritage Projects
contexts: looking both ways
Looking Both Ways, a sign of the changing times, is the
culmination of two decades of Native reorganization and
renegotiated relations with academic researchers. Two
archaeological negotiations epitomize crucial aspects of
the process. In 1984 the Kodiak Area Native Association
(KANA), under the new presidency of Gordon Pullar, entered
into a partnership with the archaeologist Richard
Jordan to involve Native youth and elders in an excavation
in the village of Karluk. Local people were deeply
moved by confronting carved wooden masks, stone tools,
and spruce-root baskets from their ancestral past. One
woman’s face “reflected both confusion and sadness. Finally
speaking, she said, ‘I guess we really are Natives
after all. I was always told that we were Russians’ ”
(Pullar 1992:183). The Karluk project, with its Native
participation and local dissemination of results, would
become a model for subsequent excavations in Alutiiq
communities (Knecht 1994). In 1987 the Kodiak Island
community of Larsen Bay petitioned for the return of
ancestral bones and artifacts collected in the 1930s by
the physical anthropologist Alesˇ Hrdlicˇka and preserved
in the Smithsonian Institution’s collections. After four
years of sometimes bitter struggle, the materials were
returned and the skeletal remains reburied (Bray and Kil-
10 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
lian 1994). The Larsen Bay repatriation was a landmark
in the wider renegotiation of relations between United
States Indian communities and scientific institutions
that resulted in the Native Graves Protection and Repatriation
Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, and it was a rallying
point for the dispersed Native peoples on and around
Kodiak Island who were coming to see themselves as
custodians of a distinctive “Alutiiq” history and culture.
During the 1990s Smithsonian policy, particularly at
its Arctic Studies Center, directed by William Fitzhugh,
moved decisively in the direction of collaboration with
indigenous communities. KANA, formed in 1966 during
the period of land-claims activism, had already added a
cultural heritage program animated by the archaeologist
Richard Knecht. This initiative would develop during the
1990s into the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository,
first directed by Knecht and now by the Alutiiq
anthropologist and activist Sven Haakanson Jr. By the
end of the decade the museum had moved into a new
facility in Kodiak, built with Exxon Valdez oil-spill compensation
funding. It has expanded rapidly and now sustains
a full range of educational, community archaeology,
arts, and curatorial programs.9
Its board of
directors is composed of representatives from KANA and
from eight Alutiiq village corporations, and it sponsors
projects throughout the Kodiak Island area. While the
museum is Native-centered, its staff represents diverse
heritages and works to reach the very mixed current population
of Kodiak Island: Alutiit, U.S. Americans, Filipinos,
Pacific Islanders, Central Americans.
The Alutiiq Museum board hesitated before agreeing
to cosponsor Looking Both Ways. Memories of the Larsen
Bay repatriation were fresh and suspicion of the
Smithsonian still strong. Aron Crowell, director of the
Alaska office of the Arctic Studies Center, with help
from museum staff, eventually secured support from the
board members, who recognized that a well-funded traveling
show on Alutiiq heritage was a chance to “put
Alutiiq on the map.” For the Smithsonian, collaboration
with the museum was critical to the project’s success.
Local networks from more than a decade of KANA-sponsored
heritage work could be activated, two crucial elders’
planning sessions could be organized, and an appropriate
Native venue would be available. At the
opening, four generations of an Alutiiq family cut the
ribbon, and visitors who had traveled considerable distances
to attend were met by a team of well-prepared
youth docents who had acquired specialized knowledge
of specific parts of the exhibition. Speeches, a Russian
Orthodox blessing, traditional dancers, and a banquet
made the opening a ceremony and a celebration (see Alutiiq
Museum Bulletin 7[1]).
The exhibition was built around artifacts lent by the
Smithsonian, most of them collected by William J.
Fisher, a German-born naturalist and fur trader, during
the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Masks,
clothing, and items of daily and ceremonial life were
9. See the Alutiiq Museum web site for a description of its diverse
projects: www.alutiiqmuseum.com.
exhibited, along with prehistoric and historic specimens
from the Alutiiq Museum’s archaeological repository.
While the presentation was strongly historical, enlarged
color pictures of individuals (drying salmon, picking berries),
video recordings, and images of contemporary villages
reminded viewers of the present moment—of
whose heritage this was. The exhibition themes—“Our
Ancestors,” “Our History,” “Our Way of Living,” “Our
Beliefs,” and “Our Family”—sustained a focus on community.
The old objects, returning after a century and
still linked with specific places and people, provoked
emotional reactions—sadness, recognition, gratitude,
kinship. Texts accompanying the artifacts included both
scholarly contextualizations and quotes from elders recorded
at planning meetings.
Works of traditional art, old and new, were juxtaposed.
A breathtaking skin hat once worn by shamans and
whalers, collected on the Alaska Peninsula in 1883, had
been “embroidered with caribou hair, yarn, and strips of
thin painted skin (probably esophagus), and further embellished
with puffs of ermine and sea otter fur” (Crowell
and Laktonen 2001:169). The centrality of human-animal
relations was artfully, sensuously manifested in
many of the objects. Perhaps the most stunning object
was a ground-squirrel parka sewn in 1999 by Susan Malutin
and Grace Harrod of Kodiak Island after studying
an 1883 example in the Fisher collection in Washington,
D.C. “It is made from ground squirrel pelts and accented
with strips of white ermine along the seams. Mink and
white caribou fur are used on the chest and sleeves. The
tassels are of dyed skin, sea otter fur, and red cloth with
ermine puffs” (Crowell and Lu¨ hrmann 2001:47). The exhibition
also included an example of the decorated Russian
Orthodox Christmas star that is paraded from house
to house during midwinter rituals of visiting and gift
exchange made for the exhibition by students at St. Innocent’s
Academy in Kodiak. (A color photo of the young
men, grinning and looking very “Russian,” accompanied
the 3-foot star.) A mask carved by Jerry Laktonen, now
a successful Native artist, commemorated the Exxon
Valdez disaster that had forced him to quit commercial
fishing and take up sculpture (see www.whaledreams.
com/laktonen.htm).
The diverse mix of objects, texts, and images gathered
for the exhibition signified a complex Alutiiq heritage
and identity. Cultural continuity through change was
manifested by juxtaposing ancient, historical, and contemporary
objects and images. The explicit messages
were straightforward—historically descriptive, evocative,
and celebratory. The exhibition’s catalogue offers
considerably more diversity of perspective in its accounts
of cultural and historical process. Extensive and
beautifully produced, it contains hundreds of historical
and contemporary illustrations, with detailed chapters
on culture, language, and history, on archaeological research
results and collaborations, on contemporary identity
and subsistence practices, on spiritual life and religious
traditions, on elders’ recollections and hopes. The
volume’s dedication quotes Mary Peterson, a Kodiak Is-
clifford Looking Several Ways F 11
land elder: “To all the new generations. They will learn
from this and keep it going.”
The catalogue—the term hardly captures the book’s
scope—explores a wide range of old and new places,
crafts, and social practices. Heritage is a path to the fu-
ture.10
The late Sven Haakanson Sr., a Kodiak Island elder,
inspired the project’s title: “You’ve got to look back
and find out the past, and then you go forward.” Haakanson
was speaking at an elders’ planning conference
held in 1997, when men and women from the Alutiiq
culture area gathered to talk about the old days and ways
forward: childhood experiences in the 1920s, parents and
grandparents, subsistence hunting and fishing, religion
and social values, elements of a transformed, transforming
way of life. The catalogue contains many excerpts
from this meeting, as well as testimony from Alutiiq
activists, community leaders, and scholars. Diverse Native
voices are juxtaposed with contributions from nonNative
scholars.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Looking Both
Ways is its multivocality. In the very first pages we encounter
the names of 51 elders who participated in the
exhibition or are quoted in the book. The final chapter
is composed of nine extended statements. The remaining
sections are written/assembled by scholars who have
worked closely with local communities. One of the volume’s
editors, the Native activist and educator Gordon
Pullar, contributes an illuminating chapter entitled
“Contemporary Alutiiq Identity” (2001). Virtually every
page juxtaposes quotations, images, and short essays.
The textual ensemble makes space for some 40 individual
“authors”—Native and non-Native writers of freestanding
essays or sources of extended testimonies. Quotations
from individual elders are scattered throughout.
No one holds the floor for very long, and the experience
of reading is one of constantly shifting modes of attention,
encountering specific rhetorics, voices, images, and
stories, and shuttling between the archaeological past,
personal memories, and present projects.
In the midst of a chapter called “Su´ gucihpet—‘Our
Way of Living’ ” (Crowell and Laktonen 2001), a page
begins: “Fishing sets the pace of the subsistence year. In
summer, five varieties of salmon gather in the bays or
ascend rivers to spawn.” The following page: “I remember
in the summertime my dad would wake my sisters
and me up early to go fishing.” The first tells us about
kinds of fish and how they are dried, smoked, and
canned. The second recalls the chore of cleaning the
catch while being swarmed by vicious flies (pp. 176–78).
Interspersed illustrations show (1) contemporary commercial
fishermen netting salmon, (2) “Iqsak—Halibut
hook,” from about 1899, and (3) an ivory lure in the shape
of a fish, ca. a.d. 600–1000, found in an archaeological
site on Kodiak Island. “In Looking Both Ways,” Aron
10. In Pacific Island contexts tradition (kastom) is often articulated
with “development.” On this complex temporality, a traditional
“anticipation of the future,” see Wagner (1979), other versions appear
in Sahlins (2000:419) and Kame’ eleihiwa (1992:22–23). Tilley
(1997) offers a provocative Melanesian case of what KirshenblattGimblett
(1998) calls the “second life” of heritage.
Crowell writes, “the commitment has been to diversity
of perspective, depth of inquiry, and genuine collaboration
among scholars, Elders, and communities” (2001:
13). The book’s five pages of acknowledgments, mentioning
many institutions and an enormous number of
individuals, are integral to its message. But if the general
strategy is inclusive, it is not synthetic. Differences of
perspective are registered and allowed to coexist. The
volume’s three editors represent the range of stakeholders
in the project.
Crowell, director of the Alaska office of the Smithsonian’s
Arctic Studies Center, came to the Looking Both
Ways project from prior work in the archaeology and
postcontact history of the region (e.g., Crowell 1992,
1997) and is currently pursuing collaborative archaeology
with Alutiiq communities on the Kenai Peninsula. As
project director he arranged the loan of artifacts, raised
grant money, and served as primary orchestrator/negotiator
of the exhibition and the text. He is the author or
coauthor of four chapters in the catalogue. Crowell’s ability
to work both as a Smithsonian insider and as a longterm
field researcher enmeshed in local collaborations
and reciprocities was instrumental in facilitating the
project’s coalition of diverse interests.
Gordon Pullar has been a leader in Alutiiq heritage
projects since the early 1980s, and it was his early conversations
with William Fitzhugh of the Smithsonian,
followed by Crowell’s presentation of artifact photos to
a 1988 conference on Kodiak Island, that led to concrete
plans for bringing the old Alutiiq objects to Alaska. Pullar
chaired the Looking Both Ways advisory committee
and served as political liaison to various groups and organizations.
He and other Alutiiq activists and elders
whose ideas influenced the project were much more than
“Native consultants” recruited after the basic vision was
in place; they were active from the beginning in an evolving
coalition.
The archaeologist Amy Steffian, currently deputy director
of the Alutiiq Museum, works on collaborative
excavations with communities on Kodiak Island. In the
wake of the Larsen Bay repatriation struggle, Steffian
requested and received tribal permission to resume study
of the Larsen Bay sites. Her experience established that
intense local suspicion of archaeology and anthropology
did not preclude research collaborations in situations
where trust could be established. Moreover, the fact that
the Alutiiq Museum is an archaeological repository institutionalizes
the idea that excavated heritage can be
made available for study while remaining under local
control. Along with other museum staff members and
community supporters, Steffian helped insure that Looking
Both Ways would be a broadly based gathering of
people as well as an impressive collection of artifacts.
The project’s success depended on bringing together
Native authorities, skilled professionals, and institutional
sponsors. Primary financial donors included the
Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for
the Humanities, Koniag Inc., the Alutiiq Heritage Foundation,
the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and
Phillips Alaska. Additional support was provided by an
12 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
impressive cross-section of Alaska institutions, public
and private, and nearly two dozen Native regional and
village corporations. As I have suggested, the project’s
collaborative expression of “Alutiiq heritage and identity”
reflects an open-ended moment of cultural emergence,
weaving together discussions, struggles, and accommodations
sustained over more than two decades in
a shifting context of power. A look at several precursors
and allied projects may provide a better sense of that
context—a dynamic conjuncture that, while locally particular,
has analogues elsewhere.11
precursors: crossroads and agayuliyararput
In 1988 Fitzhugh and Crowell edited the major RussianAmerican-Canadian
collaboration Crossroads of Continents:
Cultures of Siberia and Alaska. Prehistory, history,
anthropology, archaeology, and art criticism came
together in a richly documented and illustrated account
of the transnational world of Beringia. Small Siberian and
Alaskan Native groups were shown to be part of a larger,
dynamic indigenous region with a deep history of interconnection
and crossing that had been obscured by national
projects and cold war partitioning. The project
brought together for the first time many powerful and
evocative artifacts collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and preserved in Washington, D.C., St.
Petersburg, New York, and Ottawa. The effect was revelatory
not simply for students of cultural flows but for
Native Alaskans, who rediscovered lost aspects of their
tribal histories and a deep transnational context for new
“indigenous” alliances. In Looking Both Ways, Ruth Alice
Olsen Dawson, chair of the Alutiiq Heritage Foundation,
recalls her encounter with the Crossroads exhibition
at its Alaskan venue, the Anchorage Museum of
History and Art (2001:89):
For the first time we saw “snow-falling” parkas
made out of bird skins and decorated with puffins’
beaks. We saw ceremonial masks, regalia, baskets,
rattles, pictures, and drawings. The impact for me
was overwhelming. The exhibit sparked the start of
the first Native dance group in Kodiak in years. And
instead of wearing European calicos, we wore snowfalling
parkas, shook puffin-beak rattles, and wore
beaded head-dresses. It was a revelation.
There are no voices like Dawson’s in Crossroads of
Continents, and this may be the volume’s most striking
difference from Looking Both Ways. All the contributors
to the earlier collection are non-Native academics, and
the contemporary lives of Koryak, Chukchi, Yup’ik,
Aleut, Tlingit, and others appear only at the very end in
two surveys of current history in Russia and Alaska.
Named individuals emerge in a brief final section on 18
11. Quick equivalences are risky, however, and the devil is in the
(historical) details—colonial, post-, and neocolonial. A more systematic
comparison of Alaskan Native identity politics with similar
phenomena elsewhere would require work at a different scale
from that of this essay.
Alaskan Native artists. There are no photographs of living
people, whereas in Looking Both Ways they are
everywhere, mixed with historical photos and Mikhail
Tikhanov’s fabulous early-nineteenth-century portraits
(prominent in both volumes). Seven years after Crossroads
opened, Fitzhugh and Valerie Chaussonnet of the
Arctic Studies Center, recognizing the original exhibition’s
limited audience, designed a smaller, less cumbersome
version for travel to local communities on both
sides of the Bering Strait (Chaussonnet 1995). In this
project images of contemporary populations are featured,
along with writings and quotations by indigenous
authorities.
In 1996 a major exhibition entitled Agayuliyararput
(Our Way of Making Prayer) opened in the heart of
Yup’ik country—Toksook Bay, Nelson Island. In its subsequent
travel to the regional center, Bethel, and then
to Anchorage, New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle,
the exhibition of Yup’ik masks reversed the itinerary of
Crossroads, starting in venues accessible to indigenous
people and moving to more distant urban “centers.”
Masks acquired by U.S. and European museums during
the late-nineteenth-century frenzy of “salvage collecting”
now traveled back to their places of origin. Ann
Fienup-Riordan, an anthropologist whose long-term
fieldwork on Nelson Island has been part of oral-history
projects sponsored by Yup’ik authorities, conceived the
exhibition in dialogue with elders. Its success depended
both on this local commitment and on the cooperation
of museum professionals in Alaska and in Washington,
New York, Seattle, and Berlin. The exhibition catalogue,
The Living Tradition of Yup’ik Masks: Agayuliyararput
(Our Way of Making Prayer) (Fienup-Riordan 1996), is a
model of richly documented collaborative scholarship
and stunning visual presentation. While the anthropologist
appears as its author, large sections of the text are
strongly multivocal, built around quotations from elders’
recorded memories and interpretations of the masks.
In Hunting Tradition in a Changing World, FienupRiordan
(2000) reflects on her changing relations with
Yup’ik communities over the years. She traces an evolution
from assuming scholarly “independence” toward
something more like alliance anthropology and toward
textual forms that manifest the collaborative nature of
the work.12
Hunting Tradition moves beyond systematic
quotation to intersperse among its essays seven freestanding
texts written by Yupiit. Along with clustered
accounts of Yup’ik Christianity and extended urban-rural
networks, Fienup-Riordan provides an illuminating analysis
of the mask exhibition’s origins and especially of its
significance in different venues (pp. 209–51). The name
chosen by the Yup’ik planning committee, Agayuliyararput,
fused old and new meanings. In the pre-Christian
past agayu referred to performances honoring animals or
12. It is arguable that her choice to remain unaffiliated with any
university or governmental institution has given her the flexibility
to pioneer collaborative styles of work, engaging in relations and
projects which might have seemed “unprofessional” before they
became, under pressure, the norm.
clifford Looking Several Ways F 13
persons who were providers, and it has since taken on
the Christian sense of “praying.” “Our Way of Making
Prayer” thus articulates a process of historical translation.
(It was not guaranteed that priests and conservative
Christians in the local communities would approve of
the paganism associated with the renewed enthusiasm
for mask making and dancing. In fact they did, with en-
thusiasm.13
) Fienup-Riordan describes how, as the exhibition
traveled beyond Yup’ik communities, the name
Agayuliyararput, rich in local significance, diminished
in prominence, becoming a subtitle.
In Toksook Bay and Bethel the most important meanings
of the masks centered on who had made them and
where they were from. Place (rather than theme or style)
was the organizing principle determined by the local
steering committee. It was also decided that Yup’ik language
had to appear prominently in the exhibition’s
name and in the elders’ interpretations, painstakingly
transcribed and translated by Marie Meade, a Yup’iklanguage
specialist, teacher, and traditional dancer (see
Meade 2000). These vernacular materials were featured
in a specially printed bilingual catalogue that preceded
the lavishly illustrated English-language version. Available
at Toksook Bay and Bethel, the “Yup’ik catalogue”
sold out quickly and was adopted in school curricula
teaching local culture and history.14
The exhibition opening
coincided with an already established dance festival,
a gathering of hundreds of people flown in from remote
villages by light aircraft, and thus it became part of an
ongoing tradition of midwinter gatherings.
In Anchorage, Alaska’s largest urban center, where significant
Native communities live more or less permanently,
the masks were seen as part of a wider pan-Alaskan
indigenous heritage. In New York, at the National
Museum of the American Indian, the masks were contextualized
less in terms of local Alaskan practices than
as contributions to great Native American art. In Washington,
D.C., and Seattle, formalist, “high art” presentations
predominated. Fienup-Riordan portrays these
contexts not as distortions but rather as aspects of a potential
range of Yup’ik meanings in the late twentieth
century. The “centering” of the exhibition—its planning
and opening in Toksook Bay—reflects a crucial priority
for a renewed politics of indigenous authenticity. It is
not, however, the sole priority, and the local is actively
13. The Oregon Society of Jesus web site (http.www.nwjesuits.org/
ignati/nwjf9508.htm) proudly recounts Fr. Rene Astruc’s role in
lifting the Catholic Church’s ban on Yup’ik dancing and encouraging
its revival. “The dancing priest” was an active agent in the
social and cultural rearticulations that made Agayuliyararput
possible.
14. An interesting contrast is provided by Julie Cruikshank’s (1998:
16) account of Athabaskan elders’ insistence that their recorded
stories and memories be published in English: “What emerged . . .
was a strong commitment to extend communication in whatever
forms possible, writing being one way among many. There was also
optimism—probably a result of a history of self-confident multilingualism—that
English is just one more Native language, in fact
the dominant Native language at the end of the century.” The
Yup’ik and Athabaskan linguistic situations differ, and notions of
cultural “authenticity” need to be grounded in specific limits and
possibilities of translation and communication.
defined and redefined in relationships with a variety of
“outsides” and scales of belonging. A “worldwide web,”
in Fienup-Riordan’s provocative expression (2000:
151–82), of Yup’ik kinship and culture obliges us to consider
a range of overlapping performative contexts, tactical
articulations, and translations: rural/urban, oral/
literate, family/corporate, Alaskan/international.
Hunting Tradition concludes with a recent visit to the
Berlin Museum fu¨ r Vo¨lkerkunde by a group of Yup’ik
elders accompanied by the anthropologist (Fienup-Riordan
2000:252–70). The discussions there were governed
by Yup’ik protocols and agendas. The goal was not the
return of traditional artifacts preserved in Germany. The
visitors expressed gratitude for the museum’s curatorship,
since in the old days it was customary to destroy
masks after use. They were primarily interested in the
return of important stories and knowledge renewed
through the encounter with the old masks, spears, and
bows. What mattered was not the reified objects but
what they could communicate for a Yup’ik future. Understood
in this historical frame, museums, as the elder
Paul John put it, were “part of God’s plan.”
The Living Tradition of Yup’ik Masks (Fienup-Riordan
1996) looks both ways: to a recollected past and to a
dynamic present-becoming-future. The catalogue portrays
Yup’ik cultural production enmeshed in specific
contact histories: colonial (Russian and American) and
now post-/neocolonial (indigenous resurgence). The
translated renditions of the masks’ meanings and uses
are not located solely or even primarily in traditional
(pre-1900) contexts. The catalogue emphasizes contact
histories of collecting (including aesthetic appropriation
of the dramatic masks by the surrealists), periods of missionary
suppression, and recent movements of revival in
Catholic, Orthodox, and Moravian communities. The
perspectives of different generations on rearticulated currents
of spirituality and aesthetics are kept in view. The
collaborative genesis of the exhibition and its local significance
are stressed from the outset in a chapter titled
“Our Way of Making an Exhibit.”15
It is instructive to compare The Living Tradition of
Yup’ik Masks with an earlier Smithsonian-sponsored catalogue
and exhibition devoted to similar objects and histories
from the same region. Inua: Spirit World of the
Bering Sea Eskimo, by William Fitzhugh and Susan Kaplan
(1982), was an innovative project for its time. Like
the later exhibition, it returned objects held in Washington
museums to Alaskan venues, though not to Native
homelands. Its focus was a collection of artifacts
acquired in the late 1870s by Edward William Nelson in
western Alaska. The narrow time period, contextualized
in a broad historical/archaeological/natural frame, gave
the exhibition a temporal/social specificity that separated
it from more common “cultural” or “primitive art”
approaches. A final section of the catalogue, “Art in
Transformation,” provided a glimpse of later develop-
15. Fienup-Riordan’s deepening collaborative work will be manifested
in two forthcoming publications (2004a, b) the latter complemented
by a bilingual version for local use.
14 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
ments: the discovery of representational ivory carving
and the emergence of individual “Eskimo artists” who
would develop new graphic styles and carving traditions
for an expanding art market. Except for these last pages,
however, contemporary populations were absent from
the book. An “Eskimo” voice—unattributed quotations
from recorded myths—appeared as a kind of chorus.
If Inua seems dated today, this is a comment less on
its substantive achievements, which remain considerable,
than on rapidly changing times, identifications, and
power relations. The lack of visible participation by
Yup’it and Inupiat in the exhibition process contrasts
with the explicit collaborations described by Crowell and
Fienup-Riordan. Moreover, the earlier exhibition’s focus
on “the Bering Sea Eskimo,” including under this rubric
both Yup’ik and Inupiaq, would today be ruled out by
the disaggregation of “Eskimos” into Inuit, Inupiat, Yupiit,
and Alutiit, an outcome of Alaskan and Canadian
Native identity politics during the 1980s and ’90s. This
process was significantly (though not solely) driven by
the struggles surrounding ANCSA, whose politics of Native
regrouping were making headway at the time Inua
was produced. Subsequent decades would see many articulations
of Fienup-Riordan’s “conscious culture.” The
Native corporations created after 1971 offered new leadership
roles and sources of funding for cultural/heritage
projects such as the Alutiiq Museum, other cultural centers,
and education and language initiatives. Local, regional,
and international dance/art/storytelling festivals,
Native studies programs in universities (sometimes including
“elders in residence”), Native participation in
resource management, teacher training programs, the
growth of indigenous art markets, and cultural tourism—
all these contributed to a sharply increased Native presence
in Alaska public culture.
A full historical—political, social, economic, and cultural—account
of the increased Native presence and heritage
activity in Alaska after the 1970s is beyond my
present compass. However, a few reflections on how
these movements are related to the social and economic
contexts created by ANCSA may be useful. The relations
are intimate, partial, and overdetermined. Recent studies
argue that the Native corporate structure through which
the U.S. Congress “settled” aboriginal land claims has
had ambiguous and in some cases disastrous consequences.
Ramona Ellen Skinner’s survey Alaska Native
Policy in the Twentieth Century (1997) shows how a law
intended to foster indigenous self-determination became
recognized as a recipe for eventual termination, limiting
“Native” status to those born before 1971 and ultimately
allowing unfettered sales of tribal assets. Amendments
to the law attempting to correct its temporal limit on
corporate participation and slowing the transfer of stock
to non-Natives have only partially dealt with its fundamental
problems. ANCSA, from this perspective, is a
pact with the devil of capitalism. By making Native assets
indistinguishable from other private property, the
law has significantly expanded participation in the Alaskan
and international economy. But this “development”
comes at the cost of extinguishing aboriginal title to
land, creating Native capitalist elites, and forcing shortsighted,
profit-motivated decisions about resource management.
Kirk Dombrowski’s recent discussions (2001,
2002) are particularly informative on these effects, particularly
in the timber-rich south.
Overall, the economic situation of Alaska’s Native corporations
is quite uneven, and ANCSA’s articulation with
the new identity politics has taken different forms in different
Native contexts, depending on resource wealth, extractive
pressures from powerful corporations, and degree
of urbanization and acculturation. It is obviously important
to distinguish the community-based heritage education
and revival practiced by institutions like the Alutiiq
Museum, the midwinter Orthodox “starring”
ceremonies and Yup’ik dance festivals in Toksook Bay,
pan-Alaskan institutions like the Alaska Native Heritage
Center, and the Indian villages maintained for cruise-ship
tourists along the South Alaska Inland Passage. In each
case, one needs to ask what old and new cultural and social
elements are being articulated, what audiences are being
addressed by specific performances, and what are the social/linguistic
relations and tradeoffs of translation. Such
questions are critical for a nonreductive understanding of
a complex historical conjuncture.
Native Alaska is caught up in a local/global constellation
of forces that can be roughly characterized as post-
1960s/neoindigenous and corporate/multicultural. Heritage
projects reweave diverse social and cultural
filiations in ways that are aligned by this conjuncture
while also exceeding it. Multiple historical projects and
possible futures are active. In Dombrowski’s ethnographically
nuanced analysis (2001) and the related but more
functionalist account of Kodiak capitalism by Arthur
Mason (2002), cultural politics appears as largely a matter
of corporate ideology, commodified tribal symbols, and
tourist spectacles: an Alaskan “identity industry.” In this
perspective, which brings Native class and status differences
into view, the state and corporate capitalism ultimately
call the shots. I would argue for another view
of determination in which capitalism and state power
do not “produce” indigenous identities, not at least in
any global or functional way, but set limits and exert
pressures (Williams 1977:83–89). Struggles over indigenous
practice occur, as Dombrowski rightly puts it,
“within and against” Western institutions and hegemonic
ideas such as “culture.”
All of the heritage work discussed here is connected
to capitalism in variously configured relations of dependency,
interpellation, domination, and resistance. As
Marx said, people make history but not in conditions of
their choosing. This observation has always been brutally
relevant to Native peoples’ experiences of conquest,
resistance, and survival. Yet Marx also affirmed that, in
conditions not of their choosing, people do make history.
The unexpected resurgence of Native, First Nations, Aboriginal,
etc., societies in recent decades confirms the
point. And while indigenous heritage and identity movements
have indeed expanded dramatically during the recent
heyday of corporate liberalism, this conjuncture
does not exhaust their historicity. Native cultural poli-
clifford Looking Several Ways F 15
tics builds connections extending before and potentially
after the current moment. I am inclined to see the
“praxis of indigenism”16
in Gramscian terms—as a contingent
work of positional struggle, articulation, and
alliance.
interactions: the alaska native heritage
center
The Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage is a
prominent sign of the expanding Native presence in
Alaska. Its heritage work at several scales and its multiple
audiences, community ties, and corporate connections
contrast and overlap with the Yup’ik and Alutiiq
exhibitions. Opened in 1999 as a “gathering place” for
all Alaska Native groups, the Center functions as a site
of cultural exchange, celebration, and education. Entirely
Native-run and not dependent on academic experts, it
draws its funds from a broad range of sources—tribal,
corporate, and touristic. All of its programs are approved
by a college of elders representing the principal Native
regions. Dialogue among indigenous peoples is promoted,
and communication with visitors, a high priority,
is on Native terms. The Center sometimes enters into
contracts with non-Native scholars and facilitates collaborative
projects. For example, its staff worked with
the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center to produce a
pedagogical video and web site for Looking Both Ways.
Housed in a new complex on the outskirts of Anchorage,
the Center maintains links with local and regional Native
authorities while cultivating “partnerships” with a
broad range of sponsors.
The Alaska Native Heritage Center is not a museum
focused on a collection but something more like a performance
space, featuring face-to-face encounters.
Everything is designed to facilitate conversations between
different tribal Alaskans and between Natives and
non-Natives. At the door, visitors are personally greeted.
The central space is a stage where every hour dancing or
storytelling is presented. In the Hall of Cultures, visitors
are encouraged to talk with Native artists and “tradition
bearers”17
about their work. All of the artifacts on display
are newly made traditional pieces—masks, drums, kayaks,
parkas, boots, button blankets, headgear. Outside,
16. The phrase is Dombrowki’s (2002). My perspective is, with differences
of emphasis, consistent with the analytic approach to contemporary
indigenism that he and Gerald Sider project for their
new book series “Fourth World Rising” (see Dombrowski 2001).
17. The public status of “tradition bearer” is a relatively recent
development in North American indigenous heritage politics. It
denotes individuals of deep cultural experience who are not (yet)
elders. The latter designation depends on traditional usage and local
consensus—which may, of course, include disagreement. Traditionbearer
status is more closely linked with the politics of heritage,
and it can include people of more or less mixed background who
in recent decades have returned to Native tradition, reactivating
old crafts, languages, stories, and lifeways. It thus denotes an active
commitment to transmitting community values and knowledge
and recognizes the translation and education functions of individuals
mediating between (deeply knowledgeable) elders and (relatively
ignorant) youth. Its emergence is evidence that heritage activism
extends beyond the goal of simply salvaging endangered lore.
around an artificial lake, five houses represent the past
lifeways of Alaska’s principal indigenous regions. Everywhere,
young Native men and women act as hosts and
interpreters, actively engaging visitors. During the summer
months, tourists visit in large numbers, including
regular busloads of cruise-ship passengers—a lucrative
market that the Center has successfully pursued. Workshops
and gatherings support its yearly themes (for example,
boat-building, health and Native medicines). In
winter, school visits, art demonstrations, and workshops
are organized (“Exxon Mobil master artist classes,” in
which one can learn to make Tsimshian hand drums,
Alutiiq beaded headdresses, Aleut model kayaks, and
other emblematic Native artifacts). The Center also arranges
“cultural awareness workshops” funded by Wells
Fargo Bank and adapted to the needs of diverse clients
such as the Girl Scouts, the FBI, the army and the air
force, Covenant House, and various government agen-
cies.18
Like most Native heritage projects, the Center addresses
diverse audiences—local, regional, state, and international.
The performances, alliances, and translations
vary according to the context. For tourists and other
visitors with limited time, the Center provides a clear
vision of Alaska Native presence and diversity. Colorcoded
maps and labels identify five principal Native cultures/regions—Athabascan
Yup’ik/Cup’ik, Inupiaq/St.
Lawrence Island Yup’ik, Eyak/Tlingit/Haida/Tsimshian,
and Aleut/Alutiiq—each endowed with a stylized image
or logo. The five traditional house types reinforce the
taxonomy. A message of current vitality is reinforced by
face-to-face contacts, especially with young people. For
Alaskans of various backgrounds, specialized performances
and educational events offer more sustained encounters
with Native artists and tradition bearers. The
agenda of gathering and cultural communication specifically
addresses Native people of all ages from many parts
of Alaska who are employed at the Center or attend its
events. Its work thus contributes to a loosely articulated
Native Alaskan identification following from the widespread
post-1960s indigenous revival movements and the
difficult but largely successful alliances leading to the
ANCSA land settlement.
Native resurgence, a complex process of continuity
through transformation, involves articulation (cultural
and political alliance), performance (forms of display for
different “publics”), and translation (partial communication
and dialogue across cultural and generational divides).
All are clearly visible in a Center publication that
documents and celebrates one of its annual themes and
summer workshops: Qayaqs and Canoes: Native Ways
of Knowing (Steinbright and Mishler 2001). Teams of
“master builders” and “apprentices” gathered at the
Center over a period of five months to construct eight
traditional boats: two Athabascan birch-bark canoes,
four styles of kayak (Aleut, Alutiiq, and two Central
Yup’ik), a Northwest Coast dugout canoe, and a Bering
18. The Center web site (www.alaskaNative.net) provides details
on programs and sponsors.
16 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
Straits open skin boat. Only the last-mentioned boat type
is still actively made and used; the others have entered
the relatively new category of what might be called “heritage
objects”—specially valued material sites of remembrance
and communication. (Such traditional objects
can, of course, be recently made as long as their connection
to past models is recognizably “authentic”—for
example, the squirrel parka from Looking Both Ways
mentioned above.) In the primarily first-person accounts
of boat building, elders, heritage activists, youth, and
other participants in the workshop offer perspectives on
keeping the skills alive in changing times.
A range of “Native ways of knowing” come together
in Qayaqs and Canoes: oral transmission from experienced
elders, library and museum research by Native and
non-Native builders, aspirations to identity by younger
apprentices. In a variety of team contexts, young family
members learn from older master builders; men learn
seal-skin stitching (a traditional woman’s task); women
participate in kayak framing (formerly a man’s job); an
Aleut activist of mixed heritage (an Anchorage police
detective who has rediscovered his Native past through
kayak research and construction) teaches the art to a
young man of Inupiaq background and to a young Alutiiq
woman from Kodiak Island; an 88-year-old Athabaskan
elder works in close collaboration with an anthropology
doctoral student (originally from North Dakota) recording
traditional tools and techniques; an Alutiiq activist
and tradition bearer learns kayak construction from a
young New Englander who, through research and dedicated
practice, has become expert in the craft, and they
both find out about waterproof stitching from a woman
of Cup’ik ancestry now living on Kodiak Island; the
Aleut and Alutiiq groups observe the Yup’ik teams who
are guided by more knowledgeable elders; extended networks
are activated (“Got a call from my dad in Chignik
saying he had a good tip for me on dehairing skins”).
Participants recall old stories of travel and contact
among different Alaskan populations, and they see their
interethnic encounters at the Center as renewing this
tradition. There are repeated references to a sense of expanded
Native affiliations, the linking of different, newly
related heritages. Alutiiq participants recall listening to
spoken Yup’ik and getting the gist. Elders find ways to
translate knowledge rooted in specific local hunting and
gathering practices for younger apprentices raised in
more urban conditions. The performative nature of contemporary
heritage projects is visible across a range of
occasions: the public accomplishment of painstaking
crafts and the final, exuberant celebrations, dramatic
launchings on Kachemak Bay with traditional dancers,
Orthodox prayers, formal speeches.
Different contexts of performance—the technical
demonstrations and talk that pervaded the workshop, the
intertribal exchanges, the public displays and celebrations,
the circulation of an evocative, elegantly illustrated
book—activate different audiences and situations
of translation. In their commentaries, the participants
recognize that tradition is being renegotiated for new
situations. Young women express satisfaction at doing
work formerly restricted to men. Elders adjudicate what
practices are bound by rules and what can be pragmatically
altered. In an atmosphere of serious fun, people
work within while pushing the limits of tradition. Grace
Harrod, who taught the Alutiiq team waterproof stitching,
offers a humorous and far-reaching anecdote (Steinbright
and Mishler 2001:87):
I called my mom on the phone in Mekoryuk. I said,
“Mom, I’m going to sew a kayak.” Over the phone
she just hollered, “You don’t know how.” So, my
dad, Peter Smith, got on the phone, and I said, “Dad,
I’m going to sew a kayak.” He said, “It’s going to
sink” in Eskimo. He started laughing. I said, “Dad,
it’s going to be in a museum. They’re going to put it
in a museum when I’m done with it.” He said, “Go
ahead, sew it. It won’t sink in a museum.”
One might be inclined to interpret this kayak as a
“traditional” object belonging to a nostalgic, postmodern
culture—a thing with meaning only as a specimen and
a work of art, artificially separated from the currents of
historical change (thus “unsinkable,” in its museum).
But this would privilege the authenticity of objects over
the social processes of transmitting and transforming
knowledges and relationships. It would miss the multiaccented,
intergenerational work of articulation, performance,
and translation that goes into the kayak’s production
and interpretation. Similarly complex, openended
social processes are at work in the identity formations
of those who have recently come to be known
as Alutiiq.
Emergence and Articulation
Looking Both Ways documents an identity rearticulated
in new circumstances, a historical process of emergence.
The name “Alutiiq” does not appear in Crossroads of
Continents, where the people south of the Yup’ik are
primarily described as “Pacific Eskimo,” and even in her
most recent book Fienup-Riordan (2000:9) writes of a
“larger family of Inuit cultures, extending from Prince
William Sound on the Pacific Coast of Alaska . . . into
Labrador and Greenland.” Linguistic form here overrides
differences of subsistence, history, and environment. But
the former “Pacific Eskimo” now reject identification
with the Inuit/Inupiaq/Yup’ik cultural “family.”
Another long-standing term for the people represented
in Looking Both Ways is “Aleut.” (“Alutiiq” was, in fact,
an adaptation of the Russian “Aleuty” in the sound system
of Sug’stun.) A Russian misnomer for the chain islanders
(who generally now prefer to be called Unangan),
“Aleut,” in its expanded usage, registers common historical
experiences (Russian colonization, exploitation,
massacres, religious conversion, intermarriage) as well
as shared maritime hunting economy and coastal subsistence.
Linguistically, however, the chain islanders and
people of Kodiak differ markedly, and while cultural and
kinship ties are still significant, there has been a strong
clifford Looking Several Ways F 17
recent tendency to distinguish “Aleut” from “Alutiiq.”
Tactical name changes—reflecting new articulations of
resistance, separation, community affiliation, and tribal
governance—are familiar and, indeed, necessary aspects
of decolonizing indigenous politics.
Looking Both Ways makes serious attempts not to
freeze these processes by objectifying Alutiiqness. Its
strong archaeological and historical emphases keep
many tangled roots in view. For example, early explorers
plausibly related the inhabitants of Kodiak Island to
Greenland “Eskimos,” to Siberians, to Aleutian islanders,
and to “Indians” (Athabaskans and Tlingit). In their
archaeological, anthropological, and historical survey of
“Alutiiq culture,” Aron Crowell and Sonja Lu¨ hrmann
(2001) provide evidence that at different moments each
of these connections made sense. Later, Russian influences
were strong, and the Orthodox religion would sink
deep, tangled Native roots. In the late 1800s Scandinavian
immigrant fishermen influenced local practices and
were absorbed by kinship networks. The catalogue’s historical
sections offer a multivocal, nonessentialist account
of a fundamentally interactive tradition. Gathering
together much historical and archaeological evidence
that has been widely dispersed and never before made
accessible to Native communities, Crowell, Lu¨ hrmann,
Steffian, and Leer attempt the difficult task of telling a
coherent Alutiiq story for the first time without merging
past and present into a seamless “culture.” Since documentary
evidence, in Crowell and Lu¨ hrmann’s words,
is “partial and imperfect at best” (p. 30), they complement
the written record with Alutiiq oral narratives.
Patricia Partnow, an ethnographer who has just published
Making History: Alutiiq/Sugpiaq Life in the
Alaska Peninsula (2003), is the only contemporary nonNative
cultural anthropologist represented in the volume.
(Jeff Leer, a linguist who has produced Kodiak Alutiiq
dictionaries, pedagogical grammars, and place-name
records, also makes important contributions.) Partnow
acknowledges her “mentor,” the late elder Ignatius Kosbruk,
and many Alutiiq “teachers.” Until recently she
served as vice president of education at the Alaska Native
Heritage Center. These relations indicate the kinds
of involvements that make anthropological research possible
in a region where only a decade ago, as Gordon
Pullar recalls, “anthropologists were beginning to wear
out their welcome” (2001:78). Partnow reports her Alutiiq
hosts’ lack of concern with definitive origins and
sharp ethnic borders. By identifying themselves as Alutiiq,
she writes, “they were privileging one part of their
genetic and cultural background and underplaying their
Athabaskan, Russian, Scandinavian, Irish, and Yup’ik
parts” (2001:69). Alutiiq identity is a selective rearticulation
of diverse connections, a sense of continuity expressed
in elders’ traditional stories, both “mythic” and
“historical.” (Partnow appears to confirm Julie Cruikshank’s
[1998] penetrating view of Athabaskan elders’
narratives less as records of a past than as reconnections
of fragmented realities and reframings of current issues.)
Partnow identifies five core elements of identity: (1) ties
to land, (2) a shared history and continuity with the past,
(3) the Alutiiq or Sug’stun language, (4) subsistence, and
(5) kinship. These are not prescriptive elements of a cultural
essence, a check-list of authenticity. In today’s conditions
of social and spatial mobility it is seldom possible
to “exemplify all five points equally. Instead, people accentuate
different parts of their Alutiiqness at different
times and in different places” (p. 69). “Alutiiq” is a workin-progress,
a way of managing diversity and change.
Each one of Partnow’s five elements has undergone
transformation since the Russians and, a century later,
the Americans established colonial dominance. The
changes continue through the intensifying indigenous
movements of the 1960s and the land settlements and
corporate reorganizations of the ’70s and ’80s.
alutiiq “tides and currents”
There is nothing ready-made about Alutiiqness in the
chapter on contemporary Alutiiq identity written/assembled
by Gordon Pullar. He begins by invoking his
mother, who resolutely identified herself as Russian
even though her nearest truly Russian ancestors were
eight generations distant. He, by contrast, growing up in
the cold-war 1950s, had rejected this historical identity
but without a clear alternative. He cites others who, at
the time of ANCSA enrollment in the early 1970s, resisted
pressures to identify themselves as Alutiiq—some
because they felt that a Native identity would diminish
a hard-won “Americanness” and others like his grandmother,
who commented: “Are they trying to make an
Aleut out of you?” (2001:74).
Pullar and the elders he cites make it clear that “Alutiiq”
identification is something more than a return to
an essential, continuous Native tradition. Considerable
disconnecting and reconnecting was involved in the processes
out of which “a new unity was forged.” Clarifying
fuzzy borders with near neighbors involved specific realignments
and a good deal of confusion. Pullar quotes
Margaret Knowles at the 1997 elders’ conference that
guided Looking Both Ways (2001:81):
I realized that we are not the true Natives and the
fact remained that we really didn’t even know who
we were. And that really bothered me. It angered me
because I . . . well, who are we? . . . I was embarrassed
when I’d be around other groups, Yup’iks,
who absolutely knew who they were and where they
were from, . . . and I didn’t. I didn’t know. And they
said, “Well it depends on what anthropologist you
talk to.” I always believed I was Aleut and then
somebody said, “No, you’re really Koniag.” And,
“No, you’re really Pacific Eskimo,” “No, you’re Sugpiaq.”
“No, you’re really more related to the
Yup’ik.”
Pullar traces the emergence of “Alutiiq” during the
1970s as a series of reidentifications in a specific historical
conjuncture, the chaotic/creative aftermath of
ANCSA.
Looking Both Ways represents an unusually clear and
18 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
perhaps extreme example of constitutive political articulations
that are active, to varying degrees, across the
spectrum of Alaskan Native identities and traditions.
The elder Roy Madsen invokes long lists of Russian and
Scandinavian names, comparing Alutiiq tradition to
“bits and pieces” of seaweed and twigs in swirling waters
where the ocean tide meets a stream. The culture, he
writes, “has been pushed, shoved, jostled and propelled
from the time of our earliest ancestors to the present
day.” Madsen recalls the several languages he heard as
a child (including Slavonic at church) and his father’s
knowledge of English, Danish, German, and seven Eskimo
dialects. In the “tides and currents” of historical
change, “the homogeneous culture of our ancestors has
been transformed into the heterogeneous culture that we
experience today, mixed, mingled, blended and combined
with those many other cultures, retaining some of each
but still with some recognizable and acknowledged aspects
of the culture of our Alutiiq ancestors” (2001:75).
Madsen’s vivid image of a culture in flux and recombination
imagines not a traditional “core” resisting
change but rather a series of combinations of ancestral
and foreign influences contributing to the survival and
adaptation of a Native people (indigenous Russian Orthodoxy
is perhaps the most striking example). Robert
Lowie once famously described culture as “a thing of
shreds and patches.” Roy Madsen and many of the contributors
to Looking Both Ways give this conception an
indigenous historical specificity. If people are devoutly
Orthodox, it is because in the early years of brutal colonial
exploitation a degree of safety could be found in
religious conversion, which brought with it Russian citizenship.
If the Alutiiq (or Sug’tsun) language is endangered,
it is because of intense disruptions and all-toofamiliar
boarding school prohibitions. If some have felt
reluctant to embrace Native identity, it is because memories
of bitter events (such as Grigorii Shelikhov’s massacre
of Kodiak Islanders at Refuge Rock, a constitutive
trauma that Pullar highlights) have led to intense psychic
repression and a “sense of hopelessness brought on by
decades of dependency on outsiders” (Pullar 2001:76).
But if indigenous memory, coming to terms with a sad
history, tells and retells horror stories, it does so, in Looking
Both Ways, to clear the way for a more hopeful future.
Pullar and many others tell a story of struggle and
renewal.
Elders remember their confusion and outrage when in
1931 Alesˇ Hrdlicˇka arrived on Kodiak Island to dig up
human remains for his research collections at the Smithsonian.
Looking Both Ways contains a photograph of
hundreds of boxes filled with bones awaiting reburial at
a 1991 ceremony presided over by Alutiiq elders and Orthodox
priests. Pullar notes that the Larsen Bay repatriation
movement “came at a time when the search for
identity and cultural pride was underway on Kodiak Island.
It became a symbol for tribal self-determination”
(2001:95). Here, as elsewhere in Native communities,
repatriation has been a crucial process of healing and
moving on. John F. C. Johnson, chairman of the Chugach
Heritage Foundation, contributes an essay on the return
of masks and other artifacts looted from caves in Prince
William Sound. He writes: “A cultural renaissance is
now sweeping across Alaska like a winter storm. Native
cultural centers and spirit camps for the Native youth
are being built across this great land and in record numbers”
(2001:93). Repatriation is a critical part of these
heritage movements. It establishes indigenous control
over cultural artifacts and thus the possibility of engaging
with scientific research on something like equal
terms. Repatriation is not, Johnson stresses, “the end to
the thirst for knowledge, but is a new starting point in
building trust and cooperation. . . . Cooperation and partnership
with science is important if we want to understand
the full picture of human history” (p. 92).
Dawson (2001) discusses the establishment of the Alutiiq
Museum and Archaeological Repository and describes
current archaeology programs that include youth
internships, elder participation, and the return of all discoveries
to the community. “Children from the Kodiak
schools now come to the museum to touch our past and
learn about our people. The museum has helped turn
around local prejudices about being Native. And the researchers
now must come to Kodiak to study the collections,
instead of us begging for them” (p. 90). As Steffian
points out, archaeology’s important role may be
partly due to the fact that Alutiiq—swiftly conquered in
the eighteenth century by the Russians, devastated by
diseases, and for centuries participants in the capitalist
world system—preserved relatively less “traditional”
culture than other Alaskan groups (2001:130). People
concerned with their Alutiiq heritage have needed, figuratively
and literally, to dig into their past to find
themselves.19
While this history partly explains the openness of
many Alutiit to ongoing archaeological research, a shift
in relations of authority and power has also been essential.
Steffian suggests as much in her discussion of “partnerships
in archaeology” (2001:129–34). The self-determination
achieved through the Larsen Bay repatriations
established new relations with institutions such as the
Smithsonian and the University of Alaska. At the same
time, the growth of Native-led corporations, museums,
and heritage projects has provided new sites for organizing
research and disseminating results. Finally, and
crucially, relations of trust and respect have been sustained
over the past two decades by individual scholars
working in long-term, reciprocal relations with communities.
Knecht, reflecting on the seminal Karluk excavation,
concludes: “As archaeologists we had come to
Kodiak to study Alutiiq culture but while doing so un-
19. The potential uses of archaeology by subordinate peoples “to
help maintain their pasts in the face of the universalizing and dominating
processes of Westernization and Western science . . . [and]
to maintain, reform, or even form a new identity or culture in the
face of multinational encroachment, outside powers, or centralized
government” are emphasized by Ian Hodder in an important argument
for “interpretive archaeology” (1991:14). Hodder also recognizes
that there are no political guarantees—that heritage archaeology
can be appropriated by development projects and
governmental “resource management.”
clifford Looking Several Ways F 19
wittingly became an inextricable part of the very culture
history we had sought to understand” (2001:134).
heritage relations, changing weather
The relationships are not without tension. When Dawson
defends archaeology, she also recognizes that “many
object to archaeological research as they feel it would be
better left alone. For some this may be appropriate. But
for me archaeology has opened a new world. The key is
that the Native people must control the research effort.
Otherwise it’s just another rip-off, with scientists coming
in and taking instead of sharing” (2001:89–90). Power
is openly an issue in the new research partnerships. Pullar
(2001:78) takes a certain distance from the version of
Alutiiq anthropology, archaeology, and history presented
by Crowell and Lu¨ hrmann:
The results of academic research are, of course, important
in describing how Alutiiq people have come
to view themselves today. But at the same time, the
reader must decide how the various views of Alutiiq
culture and identity fit together. Listening to Alutiiq
people about how they view their own history is
equally important. There are times when the indigenous
viewpoint is diametrically opposed to that of
Western scholarship. The age-old question “what is
truth?” may be appropriate in this circumstance.
The proposition that there can be more than one
truth is often overlooked.
Pullar does not object to anything specific in Crowell
and Lu¨ hrmann’s discussion (which weaves together academic
research findings and elders’ memories) but argues
more generally that academic and Native positions
of authority need to be distinguished if new relations are
to emerge. As do many indigenous intellectuals today,
Pullar urges that traditional origin myths be given equal
status alongside the findings of archaeology. The insistence
is less on agreement than on respect. He traces the
emergence on Kodiak Island of “codes of ethics” governing
scientific research (prior community permission,
direct participation, sharing of results). Of course, more
than a few scholars will be reluctant to accept such limitations,
withdrawing to less fraught research contexts
while privately—and sometimes publicly—protesting
against religious obscurantism and political censorship.
Among indigenous activists a corresponding suspicion is
reinforced by painful histories of “arrogant,” “intrusive,”
or “exploitative” scientific collecting. Indeed, Pullar’s
appeal for equality of indigenous “myth” and Western
“science” may represent, for the moment, a utopian vision,
given histories of mutual suspicion and persistent
power imbalances (for example, the unequal struggle of
oral tradition and documentary evidence in land-claims
litigation). In the face of these antagonistic legacies,
Looking Both Ways proposes a space in which, as Pullar
says, “the reader must decide how the various views of
Alutiiq culture and identity fit together.” Crowell, in his
introductory chapter, traces changing academic practices
and argues for the specificity and thus partiality of “all
ways of looking at culture—from both the outside and
the inside” (2001:8). Part genuine coalition, part respectful
truce, Looking Both Ways offers varied perspectives
that need to be adjusted, weighed, and assembled. What
is proposed by all contributors to the volume is not a
take-it-or leave-it vision of scientific versus Native truth
but a pragmatic relationship: live-and-let-live where
there is opposition, collaboration in the considerable areas
of overlap.
Lines are drawn around heritage and identity but not
hardened. Sven Haakanson Jr., a recent Ph.D. in anthropology
from Harvard and currently director of the Alutiiq
Museum, offers a pointed meditation on the predicament
of the “Native anthropologist.” He gives no absolute
privilege to “insider” knowledge (his own academic
fieldwork was among Siberian reindeer herders) and asks
why the Native anthropologist is always, in effect, required
to speak from an “emic” rather than an “etic”
position. “Is not the whole purpose of research to learn,
including the exploration of different approaches to
knowing (hermeneutics)? If Natives cannot write from
both Native and scientific perspectives then what is the
purpose of doing anthropology?” (2001:79). Citing the
examples of Knud Rasmussen (Greenlandic Inuit/Danish),
Oscar Kawagley (Yup’ik), and Alfonzo Ortiz (Tewa),
Haakanson argues that “Native approaches to the field,”
while not necessarily better, “are just as valid as any
others.” As do many others in Looking Both Ways, he
recognizes differential authorities while sustaining,
where possible, contexts of exchange and translation.
The Alutiiq heritage visible here is not a single thing,
with sharply defined “insides” and “outsides.” In Pullar’s
words, it is “defined by a mosaic of historical events
and overlapping criteria” (2001:95). Inflexible measures
of belonging such as the blood quantum required for
ANCSA enrollment in practice exclude many who cannot
be sure of their exact ancestry. Looking Both Ways
emphasizes “kinship,” including alliance as well as
blood (pp. 95–96). This relational way of being Alutiiq
depends on participation in Native life: residence in a
village, Orthodox religious practice, language use, subsistence
activities, heritage revival and transmission.
Alutiiqness is thus something constantly rearticulated
in changing circumstances and power-charged relations
with relatives and outsiders. Indeed, one is left with the
impression that the political label “Alutiiq,” although it
is becoming institutionally entrenched (with the help of
projects like Looking Both Ways), cannot be a definitive
“tribal” or “national” name. In some communities
“Aleut” is still favored, and whereas “Alutiiq” strongly
suggests Pullar’s historical mosaic, an alternative ethnonym,
“Sugpiaq,” evokes ties with older, pre-Russian
traditions. People use more than one term, depending on
the audience and the occasion.
In Looking Both Ways descriptions of traditional forms
of life (archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, interspersed
with elders’ statements) evoke facets of a distinctive
style: “our way of living.” To call this way of
living “Alutiiq” consolidates and marks off a discrete
20 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
identity. Scholars have understood similar processes of
social differentiation as “ethnic” boundary-marking
(Barth 1969), the processual “invention” of culture (Wagner
1981), and “ethnogenesis” (Roosens 1989, Hill 1996).
Each of these approaches captures something of what is
going on.20
All assume that selective, creative cultural
memory, border policing, and transgression are fundamental
aspects of collective agency. Culture is articulated,
performed, and translated, with varying degrees of
power, in specific relational situations. Economic pressures
and changing governmental policies are very much
part of the process, and so are changing ideological contexts
(for example, post-1960s cultural movements and
the development of global “indigenous” politics). Components
of “tradition”—oral sources, written texts, and
material artifacts—are rediscovered and rewoven. Attachments
to place, to changing subsistence practices,
to circuits of migration and family visiting are affirmed.
None of this suggests a wholly new genesis, a made-up
identity, a postmodernist “simulacrum,” or the rather
narrowly political “invention of tradition” analyzed by
Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), with its contrast of lived
custom and artificial tradition. If “authenticity” means
anything here, it means “authentically remade.”
I have proposed articulation, performance, and translation
as components of an analytic tool kit for understanding
old/new indigenous formations. Since no single
vocabulary can account for all the attachments, displacements,
and changes, we need to employ terms tactically
and in combination. Still another dimension is suggested
by a language of “diasporic” (dis)connections. In Looking
Both Ways, Mary Jane Nielsen (2001) and Marlane Shanigan
(2001) write about villages abandoned (because of
economic pressure or seismic catastrophe) and express a
renewed desire to return. Diasporic identifications are
salient for dispersed urban populations living in FienupRiordan’s
tribal “worldwide web.” For example, the
Looking Both Ways web site (www.mnh.si.edu/lookingbothways)
has received an extraordinary number of hits.
Who are these visitors? Where are they? What is their
relation to the traditional Alutiiq villages featured on
the web site? Unfortunately, there is no feedback or chatroom
capacity that might suggest an answer.21
The multiple connections at work in Looking Both
Ways offer a provocative context for thinking in a nonabsolutist
way about heritage. Alutiiq history has been
20. The ethnogenesis approach is particularly relevant to Alutiiq
experience. In Hill’s definition, “ethnogenesis is not merely a label
for the historical emergence of culturally distinct peoples but a
concept encompassing peoples’ simultaneously cultural and political
struggles to create enduring identities in general contexts of
radical change and discontinuity” (1996:1). The perspective builds
on Edward Spicer’s (1980, 1982) pioneering work on “enduring”
indigenous societies across centuries of colonial dominance.
21. Indigenous web sites have proliferated in the past decade, and
a comparative study, if one does not already exist, is overdue. The
sites vary widely in sophistication, and they range from externally
oriented self-representations (often specifically directed at tourists
and audiences in broader national and international public spheres)
to sites that archive tribal knowledge and are primarily used in
local education. Most are specific mediations of the two poles.
a story of intense disruptions, interactive survival, and
flexible strategies for self-determination. These pragmatic
responses, struggles within and against changing
hegemonies, can be hidden by the abstract, all-or-nothing
language of “sovereignty.” Alutiiq heritage and identity
are most concretely understood not as past or revived
“traditions” but as ongoing “historical practices” (Laforet
n.d.). Of course, “historical” is a term that requires
translation, and in this context I find myself still grappling
(see Clifford 1997:343) with a statement made by
the Alutiiq elder Barbara Shagnin: “Our people have
made it through lots of storms and disasters for
thousands of years. All the troubles since the Russians
are like one long stretch of bad weather. Like everything
else, this storm will pass over some day” (quoted in
Chaussonnet 1995:15).
One might understand Shagnin as positing an ancient
cultural identity or tradition that is impervious to history’s
destructive storms. Indeed, feeling for this kind of
deep continuity with a “prehistoric” past is always part
of the indigenous longue dure´e. But there is surely more
to the metaphor. As Craig Mishler’s contribution to
Looking Both Ways, “Kodiak Alutiiq Weather Lore”
(2001:150–51), makes clear, weather in places like Kodiak
Island is never something that happens to you;
storms happen, and you are part of the happening. People
who live exposed to winds and tides, whose everyday
livelihood depends on them, have a detailed and exact
knowledge of the changing weather. They know what is
happening or is about to happen: they act and choose
not to act accordingly. Thus when Shagnin says that the
arrival of the Russians in the eighteenth century began
a long bad spell, she is not invoking something external
to Alutiiq life. History’s weather, its disasters and clearings,
are an order that is neither “natural” nor “cultural”
but, simply, given existence. Events in time occur in
cyclic patterns which are both familiar and uncontrollable.
From this perspective, the Russian bad weather
(which brought epidemics, forced labor, creole kinship,
the Orthodox religion) and the American bad weather
(missionaries, boarding schools, World War II, land
claims, ANCSA, identity movements) become part of an
unfinished indigenous history.
Collaborative Horizons
When Looking Both Ways opened in Kodiak it drew on
the community-based heritage work of the Alutiiq Museum
and Archaeological Repository. The return of traditional
artifacts from the Smithsonian, albeit on loan
(what Fienup-Riordan calls “visual repatriation”), offered
a powerful symbolic reconnection with the past. When
the exhibition traveled to Homer, on the Kenai Peninsula,
it was coordinated with the biannual cultural festival,
Tamamta Katurlluta, celebrated by the Alutiiq villages
of Nanwalek, Port Graham, and Seldovia. At
Homer, kayaks (recently built in Nanwalek) arrived on
the beach to be greeted by Kodiak Island dancers and an
Orthodox prayer. Then, at the Pratt Museum, a large
clifford Looking Several Ways F 21
potluck/potlatch feast, featuring salmon and seal delicacies,
was shared, and there were plant walks, “Eskimo
Olympics” (feats of balance, tug-of-war, leg wrestling),
and seal sampling (scientific dissection and data recording
for subsistence monitoring). The crowd—Native elders,
activists, and youth, Homer inhabitants, museum
donors and staff, visitors, and a robed priest from Nanwalek—flowed
in and out of the exhibition. While the
festival’s “gathering of tradition” was rich, it was not
all-inclusive. Many in Nanwalek did not attend. Some
could not afford air travel across the bay. Others were
busy with the salmon run—capturing, smoking, and drying
fish. The run had recently been restored, thanks to
a tribally organized spawning project in the local river
and its upstream lakes—another kind of “heritage”
work.
Alutiiq tradition was performed in several ways that
evening at the Homer High School auditorium. Nick
Tanape Sr.—a crucial Alutiiq organizer of the festival—
presented Gale Parsons of the Pratt Museum with a gift
in recognition of her work with local Alutiiq communities.
Two dance groups, in their distinctive styles, enacted
the “looking both ways” theme. A group of schoolage
children, the Kodiak Alutiiq Dancers, dressed in
old-style snow-falling parkas and beaded headdresses,
performed well-rehearsed traditional dances to a drumbeat.
The mood was earnest and respectful. The evening
ended with the exuberant Nanwalek Sugpiaq Dancers,
in their teens and twenties. Their dances, newly improvised
on old patterns were inspired by maskalataq, syncretic
masking dances performed during the Orthodox
New Year with considerable room for individual invention
and play. In Jeff Leer’s words, “The Nanwalek Dancers
purposefully use . . . knowledge [of maskalata] to
create new dances, asking themselves what this or that
movement originally represented, perhaps the surfacing
of a seal or the flight of a fowl. Therefore, although the
dances are newly invented, they are built around the bits
and pieces of traditional Alutiiq culture that the new
generation have been able to mine from the traditionbearers
of the village” (2001:219). To the twang of an
electric guitar, the dancers—some in tall Dena’ina (Athabaskan)
feather headdresses—mixed gestures and
rhythms from Native tradition and contemporary pop or
hip-hop. The effect was joyful, serious, and comic, and
by the end of the evening much of the audience was
gyrating on the stage. The next stop for Looking Both
Ways was Anchorage, and at its opening celebration the
Nanwalek dancers again brought down the house.
Events and books like Looking Both Ways are inherently
celebratory. The good news of survival and public
recognition ultimately prevails over the bad news of colonialism,
historical decimation, ongoing economic marginality,
and cultural losses. Smallpox, forced labor, contemporary
alcoholism, poverty, and high suicide rates are
seldom part of the redeeming vision. This selection and
purification is evident in the uplifting pedagogical presentations
at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Looking
Both Ways actually presents a more ambivalent historical
story, shadowed by Russian massacres and labor regimes.
Elders regret the passing of customary skills and
recall language prohibition in American boarding
schools. But the overall message is, appropriately, hopeful:
We are still here, looking back to go forward. The
good news is reinforced by many smiling portraits and
by superb color photos of artifacts and places; even the
massacre site at Refuge Rock makes stunning Alaskan
scenery.
As we have seen, the hopeful story told in Looking
Both Ways also features a vision of reciprocity in academic
research (primarily archaeology but also historical/cultural
anthropology and linguistics). The shape of
the project (and, no doubt, its broad financial support)
depended on well-established collaborative work. What
sort of a model for postcolonial research practices does
it offer? The question may be clarified with reference to
an important essay by Ruth Phillips (n.d.). Drawing on
experience directing the University of British Columbia
Museum of Anthropology, she poses several critical issues
for community-museum collaborations.
Phillips distinguishes two basic models. In the “community-based”
exhibition, indigenous authorities determine
the selection and interpretation of materials. Museum
curators function as facilitators, and a unified
Native perspective is the goal. This is primarily an exhibition
by and for a specific community, sometimes
producing displays not sufficiently contextualized for
general audiences. The second, “multivocal” model juxtaposes
Native and non-Native perspectives. The goal is
to display different interpretations of the same event or
text based on a negotiation of shared authority between
the participants. When the differences of perspective are
too sharp, audiences expecting a coherent explanation
can be confused. Phillips thinks of her two models as
ideal types that in practice are often mixed. It is worth
distinguishing them, she argues, because misunderstanding
and tension can arise when participants in a project
are working with incompatible models.
Looking Both Ways reflects a specific negotiation of
agendas. The book, as we have seen, leans toward the
multivocal, juxtaposing voices without seeking to express
a single, coherent “Alutiiq” or “scientific” perspective.
The exhibition tends toward the other model.
Overall it reflects community self-images, seamlessly
aligning academic (historical and archaeological) knowledge
with elders’ memories and visions. (The same can
be said of the web site, www.mnh.si.edu/lookingbothways,
which adopts an insider rhetoric—“our history,”
“our family,” “our beliefs,” etc.—featuring photos of
families and local villages, juxtaposed throughout with
archaeological artifacts.) The exhibition was probably
most “community-based” at the times it merged with
Native-directed heritage events and institutions—the
opening at Kodiak and the Tamamta Katurlluta Festival
at Homer. Understood as a spectrum of performances,
the Looking Both Ways project is a combination of Phillips’s
two agendas.
The book, designed to be a work of historical reference
and inspiration for both cultural insiders and outsiders,
may well achieve something like canonical status—for
22 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
better and worse. As a collaboration, its successful mediation
of potentially divisive agendas reflects, as we
have seen, a specific history of Alutiiq (re)emergence and
the work of individual scholars, activists, and culture
brokers to maintain reciprocity. Overall, the project
aligns oral traditions with scientific evidence, playing
down discrepancies. Where this is impossible, Pullar’s
“different truths” coexist.
Alliances such as Looking Both Ways require compromise
on all sides, patient listening, careful consultation,
and—the key words—equality and respect. Clearly, in
situations of ongoing oppression and acute political antagonism
their resolution will seem utopic, and indeed
it is utopic, or at least strategic, in the current Alutiiq
context. One may wonder who is not included in its
polyphony. Is there a privileging of certain activists and
spokespersons, particular elders and tradition bearers?
One occasionally glimpses the limits of this multivocality:
for example, Native opponents of archaeology are
answered but not quoted. (The resistance tends to be
found among the very old, who believe that remains
should be left alone and that buried objects may have
been polluted by shamans.) Responses to the exhibition
by the many Natives who attended have been enthusiastic,
but we are limited to anecdotal accounts. Since
travel to the exhibition’s venues can be expensive, it is
clear that many economically marginal Alutiiq in dispersed
villages cannot have participated and may well
have little interest in heritage or tradition performed on
this public scale. Thus, while recognizing the project’s
remarkable inclusiveness and range of perspectives, it is
important not to lose sight of the partiality and contingency
of its achievement. Through its polyphony, new
positions of tribal and academic authority are claimed;
tradition is textualized for public consumption, and local
arguments and sensitive topics are inevitably glossed
over.22
Placing Looking Both Ways and Agayuliyararput (Our
Way of Making Prayer) in a wider political context, it is
worth citing cautionary statements by the museum curators
Aldona Jonaitis and Richard Inglis (1994) and by
Ruth Phillips. Jonaitis and Inglis reflect on the limits of
collaborative museum work (p. 159):
Today it is de rigueur for curators to involve [Native
22. Arthur Mason (2002) proposes a class analysis of the heritage
alliances between Alutiiq corporate leaders and academic scholars
during the 1980s. His historical account of the return to tradition
and Native identity by an “Alutiiq cohort” is illuminating but
sketchy in its published form so far. He rightly underlines the role
of academic participation in Alutiiq heritage work. Linguistic maps,
excavations, and museum objects have been used, he argues, for
the development of identity and cultural legitimacy—“imagined
community” making of the sort described by Benedict Anderson
(1991). The participation of archaeologists, linguists, and anthropologists
is, however, not adequately explained by Mason’s “new
class” perspective. Looking beyond the individual intentions—
more or less idealistic—of academic heritage partners, an analysis
of concrete interests might better understand collaborative praxis
as a way of maintaining professional status, pragmatically continuing
field research in politicized situations while asserting a new
ethics of scientific knowledge.
people]—as advisors, consultants, or co-curators—in
museum representations of their culture. This is certainly
an improvement over the situation in the past
when a white, usually male, curator decided by himself
the theme and content of an exhibition. It does
not, however, solve the problems of the situation of
Native peoples in the contemporary world. Museums
have far more relevance to the powerful—those
capable of acquiring and housing art and artifacts—
than they do to the disempowered. Moreover, there
is no such entity as the Native voice, one that
speaks with authority for the entire community.
There exist many voices, some of which speak for
upholders of cultural traditions, others that address
band and tribal politics, and still others that concern
themselves with social issues. . . . The encounter of
different values, different priorities, often creates
problems that can only sometimes be resolved.
While the proliferation of tribal institutions such as the
Alutiiq Museum complicates their equation of museums
with dominant power, Jonaitis and Inglis keep us aware
of persistent inequalities and conflicting interests that
can only be partially mitigated through collaboration. In
a similar vein, Ruth Phillips (n.d.) interrogates “the role
that museums play in processes of social change”: “Put
simply, does the growing popularity of collaborative exhibits
signal a new era of social agency for museums, or
does it make the museum a space where symbolic restitution
is made for the injustices of the colonial era in
lieu of more concrete forms of social, economic and political
redress?”
These assertions are not meant to discredit either collaborative
heritage work or the community-based activism
of tribal museums. Their authors do, however, insist
on realistic expectations and the absence of guarantees.
In this they reinforce the perspective of Native scholars
like Vine Deloria Jr. (1997), who, while seeing new possibilities
for joint projects, never loses sight of ongoing
structural inequalities. Genuinely impressive works like
Looking Both Ways need to be appreciated as fruitful,
contingent coalitions rather than as performances of
postcolonial virtue.
Phillips’s question about the degree to which cultural
celebrations may, in practice, substitute for other forms
of politics does not admit of a simple answer. As I have
suggested, much depends on specific political contexts
and possibilities. A symptomatic critique of heritage
work may see it as occupying a comfortable niche in
postmodern “multicultural” hegemonies: every identity
gets its exhibition, web site, coffee-table book, or film.
I have argued that this view, while partly correct, misses
a great deal of indigenous cultural process and politics.
The old/new articulations, performances, and translations
of identity are not enough to bring about structural
socioeconomic change. But they reflect and to a real extent
create new conditions for indigenous solidarity, activism,
and participation in diverse public spheres. When
they are understood as part of a wider politics of selfdetermination,
heritage projects are open-ended in their
clifford Looking Several Ways F 23
significance. To reduce the Alaska Native Heritage Center
to a cultural theme park and cruise-ship destination
would miss its intertribal and public education agenda,
its Native youth participation, its arts programs. Similarly,
seen across their several contexts of production and
reception, Looking Both Ways and The Living Tradition
of Yup’ik Masks are much more than coffee-table books
even if they do end up on coffee tables (and some kitchen
tables). The Alutiiq Museum, while open to tourists, is
primarily a local cultural center whose oral history, community
archaeology, language, and education projects
gather and transmit a newly dynamic Alutiiq (Sugpiaq)
identity.
I have argued for a complex approach to the politics
of tradition. Native heritage projects reach selectively
into the past, opening paths to an undetermined future.
They act within and against new national and transnational
structures of empowerment and control. While it
is too early to say what the ultimate significance of these
transactions will be, it is clear that the historical weather
has changed in recent decades and that indigenous cultural
movements are very much part of the new climate.
I have also affirmed the role played by scholars, Native
and non-Native, in sustaining heritage movements. The
projects reviewed here are important, hopeful coalitions.
While they do not transcend long-standing inequalities
or resolve struggles for cultural authority, they at least
demonstrate that Natives and anthropologists, openly
recognizing a fraught common history, need not paint
themselves into corners.
Comments
kirk dombrowski
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, 899 10th
Avenue, New York, NY 10019, U.S.A. (kdombrow@
jjay.cuny.edu). 25 ix 03
Clifford (rightly) cautions us to look both ways before
crossing the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. His
main interest is the “chaotic/creative aftermath” it produced,
some vision of which he sees as a necessary correction
to an anthropological overreaction to the current
politicization of Native culture in Alaska. Posed against
the economic and ecological devastation that ANCSA
produced is a series of surprising “excesses”—social, personal,
and cultural developments that cannot have been
anticipated in the design or implementation of the act,
including the growing sophistication of Alaska Natives
in the politics of indigenism (locally, nationally, and internationally),
individual Natives’ unembarrassed sense
of the heterogeneity of their culture, a growing panAlaska
Native identity, and the wonderfully hybrid Nanwalek
dancers who brought down the (figurative) house
of Anchorage. Even the name “Alutiiq,” Clifford points
out, seems to elude obvious characterization as a tribal,
ethnic, or national name; it means something different,
something more. The emerging Alutiiq culture is “authentically
remade” and evidence that Native peoples
are prepared to deal with this fact in interesting, progressive
and novel ways.
My only worry is that these processes of remaking are
explored here as though they were taking place in a virtual
economic and social vacuum. Nowhere here do we
learn about the financing of the events and shows discussed
or of the various museum positions held by the
authors and contributors (see, in contrast, Lee and Graburn
2003). Who paid for all of this authentically remade
articulation and why? Actually, to inquire into the funding
of the museum exhibit alone would be to duck the
more important questions about the social and economic
costs of the projects undertaken here. All culture projects
have social costs that go far beyond the direct costs of
putting on shows, moving them around, and financing
their catalogues. The former, though often invisible, are
generally far more substantial than the latter and almost
always unevenly distributed within the communities being
positioned. Thus while the show and sponsoring institutions
were largely financed by monies that followed
the Exxon Valdez oil spill, we do not hear much about
how those most directly affected by the spill saw this
exhibit or its financing or how they might have spent
the money differently. Clifford acknowledges that there
remain many individuals (households?) who did not
(could not or would not?) see the shows he discusses,
but the missing are dealt with as though they were simply
absent from the current discourse—a discourse to
which their voices could only add variety and richness.
Unconsidered is the possibility that their absence from
this discourse is somehow a necessary precondition for
its reproduction.
To ask such questions is not to see Native culture as
somehow the “mere” product of capitalist hegemony; of
course it is a “contingent work of positional struggle,
articulation, and alliance.” Rather, it is to take seriously
the fact that the articulation of a particular cultural vision
requires the indirect, often unwilling cooperation
of some whose role may be simply to drop off of the
ethnographic radar. One learns very little of the culturally
disappeared here. Where did they go? Were they
among the audience whose house was brought down in
Anchorage?
Such tensions are widespread and long-standing in
Alaska. For example, the end of the cannery era in the
1960s caused the abandonment of most of the non-Native
towns in the Southeast region. Their failure resulted
from the absence of local people who were willing to
bear (or could be made to bear) the rapidly increasing
costs of social reproduction. When asked to do so, individuals
and families in non-Native towns simply left.
The Native villages in the region that survived this period
did so largely because they did contain people—both
generally and, more important, unevenly across households—who
were willing to bear (or could be made to
bear) such costs. Historical disjunctures like this require
that we think more clearly about the difference between
tradition and continuity (see Sider 2003). Tradition or
24 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
heritage (of the sort made/remade in museum exhibits)
has costs that are often most apparent in the sorts of
continuities lived by those who never set foot in a museum—winter
fishing or sealing with unsafe, unreliable
equipment, weekly trips to “beg” credit at the local grocery
store, consistently failing schools and health care
systems, ongoing high rates of alcoholism or suicide.
Urban centers throughout Alaska contain tens of
thousands of Natives who either refused to be part of
such unequally distributed processes of social reproduction
or became so marginal to these processes that they
lost their entitlement to membership in their communities.
A cultural articulation (in the shallow sense—
meaning a “vision of culture”) capable of bringing down
the current house of this same population (be it Anchorage,
or Juneau, or wherever) is interesting and, as
Clifford would argue, largely unanticipated in ANCSA.
But this simply raises the question of where the costs of
this current vision are being articulated (in the broader
sense of being worked out) and how the memory of past
cultural projects and their costs (which created Native
displacements to Anchorage or Juneau or Seattle or—we
simply do not know) can seemingly be so easily overcome.
In this sense, the articulation of Alutiiq tradition
with the continuities of life in Southwest Alaska remains
to be written.
nelson graburn and naomi
leite-goldberg
Department of Anthropology, University of California,
Berkeley, CA 94720-3710, U.S.A. (graburn@uclink4.
berkeley.edu). 26 ix 03
Clifford uses the lens of Looking Both Ways to examine
the present state of anthropologist-Native collaboration
on “heritage projects” in Alaska and to comment more
generally on the changing nature of alliances between
researchers and the people they study. He first learned
of Looking Both Ways in April 2002, when archaeologist/
project leader Aron Crowell gave a paper on his collaboration
with the people of Kodiak Island to the Department
of Anthropology at the University of California,
Berkeley (Crowell 2002). The fact that Clifford, by no
means an expert on Alaska, has been able to go from
“zero to sixty” since then with this material is testament
to his ability to grasp the essentials of “contact zones,”
as is also evident in his earlier work (Clifford 1988, 1991).
Clifford does not limit his investigations to “surfaces,”
as Moeran has characterized cultural studies (1996:
30–31): he supplemented his reading of the catalogue by
viewing the exhibition in Alaska and attending an Alutiiq
cultural festival; he also conversed with key nonNative
anthropologists in Alaska and with anthropologically
educated members of the Native elite. Nevertheless,
he remains cognizant of his “outsider position”
(n. 5) in this venture.
Relying on local reports and ethnographic documents,
Clifford shows that the events and institutions he describes
are the latest in a history of identity-reformulating
moves stemming from a litany of traumas and a more
recent history of opportunities including the massive reconstruction
of Kodiak after the disastrous earthquake
of 1964, the ascent to corporate wealth from the Alaskan
Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, and the huge
financial reparations in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez
oil spill. “Alutiiq” ethnic identity is a new construct—a
product of what has been termed the “identity
industry” (Mason 2002:13)—gathering scattered people
of mixed Sugpiaq, Russian, Scandinavian, and other European
ancestry most of whom until recently thought of
themselves as “Americans.” Clifford’s essay explores the
emergence of this new identity within the context of
other Alaskan heritage projects involving the recovery
of Native collections, ceremonies, and expressive institutions—behind
which often stand pivotal academic figures
such as Crowell in the Alutiiq case (Lee and Graburn
2003:217) and Fienup-Riordan in the case of the Nelson
Island–Kuskokwim Yup’ik (Fienup-Riordan 1996).
Throughout much of his work, Clifford’s “natives”
have been Western-trained academics, museum professionals,
and other culture-brokers like those involved in
the cases discussed here. While this focus has enabled
him to develop a rich understanding of the “production
of culture” in institutional contexts, when turning to
the question of collaboration it may have kept him from
fully elucidating the Native side of the equation. His
grasp of the ethnohistory involved is understandably limited.
Surprisingly, he takes issue with Mason’s (2002)
exposition of the rise of the Alutiiq, formerly creole,
bourgeoisie that is now the primary collaborator with
Crowell et al. (n. 26), apparently without having examined
the rich ethnographic and ethnohistoric data collected
by Mason (1996), Davis (1971, 1984), and others.
We suspect that this literature would have enriched his
argument with a more nuanced picture of the range of
Native motivations for and experiences of becoming involved
in collaborative ventures.
As it stands, Clifford’s discussion of collaboration frequently
(if implicitly) takes on the perspective of the
academic collaborator. He describes Looking Both Ways
as a success but leaves unstated how “success” is to be
defined and by whom. If we are to probe the complex
contours of academic-Native collaboration—and particularly
to gauge its possibilities and limits for both sides—
we may need to examine this kind of evaluative statement
more closely. Is success to be judged on the basis
of the process or the outcome of such projects? Beyond
the anthropologist’s need for access and the Native
group’s desire for external recognition, what motivations
come into play, and how fully are they met? What
broader outcomes are sought? When, why, and under
what conditions have Native groups initiated such projects?
Who are the intended audiences?
While Clifford’s discussion of individual “heritage projects”
implicitly addresses some of these questions, we
would have liked to see him grapple with them more
directly. For example, although he stresses the instrumental
and performative nature of Native involvement
in collaborative projects, it is clear throughout the essay
clifford Looking Several Ways F 25
that collaboration also serves the function of “repatriating”
previously inaccessible knowledge. Left relatively
undeveloped is the emotional draw of this knowledge in
creating an anchoring identity for people who previously
lacked a sense of belonging to a coherent group. Given
the overwhelming contribution of academics to the construction
of Alutiiq identity, from the perspective of outcome
one measure of a “successful” collaboration would
be whether it affords Native groups a deeper understanding
of their own history in addition to incorporating their
representatives into the creative process.
ruth b. phillips
School for Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton
University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON,
Canada K1S 5B6 (phil621@attglobal.net). 8 x 03
Museum exhibitions, like museums themselves, have
genealogies—family trees the tracing of which allows us
to place contemporary projects in critically important
perspective. Yet despite the explosion of literature about
museums during the past decade surprisingly few studies
situate their objects of analysis within these unique and
local historical lineages. Exhibitions, furthermore, do
not appear out of the void. Rather, each emerges from a
highly specific web of political, economic, and social interactions.
These genealogies and force fields cannot, of
course, manifest themselves as abstractions but are embodied
in and brought to bear on each new project by its
particular set of individual participants—curators, consultants,
writers, performers, collections managers, conservators,
museum educators. Add to this already complex
mix the vectors of decolonization and empowerment
that inform exhibits produced in contemporary settler
societies and the challenge to adequate representation
becomes daunting.
Clifford’s “Looking Several Ways,” which documents
and analyses a set of interlinked case studies of exhibits
and other cultural initiatives involving Native Alaskans,
evidences an important new stage in the evolution of his
thinking about museums and the negotiation of indigeneity.
One of the things I like most about it is its
combination of diachronic and synchronic perspectives.
By tracing the project’s antecedents back to the landmark
Crossroads of Continents (a non-collaborative project) he
makes possible a comparative perspective that both
brings into relief the innovative features of Looking Both
Ways and reveals the biographical and experiential formations
of its organizers that were, in turn, products of
these earlier projects. By contextualizing Looking Both
Ways (both exhibit and book) within the broad spectrum
of contemporary Alaskan milieus of identity construction
Clifford is able to locate the way in which an individual
exhibit (or other similar event) is produced by
and framed within a set of social processes—articulation,
performance, and translation. These processes cut across
the touristic, educational, commercial, political, pop culture,
and elite cultural spheres that have typically been
studied and understood as bounded rather than essentially
relational phenomena. (Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s
work is an important exception.) This new “analytical
tool kit” builds on Clifford’s earlier and much
cited models of the “art and culture system” and the
“museum as contact zone.” It will, I think, be equally
fertile and valuable for future work on museums, validating
and encouraging the historical and systemic perspectives
that we need. Put another way, a major virtue
of his new “tool kit” is that it links a range of commercial,
heritage, and museum sites and events and invites
us to understand them as networked and openended
rather than as locked into such closed dialectical
oppositions as tradition/modernity, authenticity/kitsch,
or purity/hybridity.
Clifford’s discussion also points to the unfinished history
of decolonization. It invites us to embrace the proposition
that this history is probably unfinishable in settler
societies in which indigenous peoples will not only remain
demographic minorities but also increasingly have
to contend with a growing number of diasporic immigrant
societies engaging in their own identity politics and projects
of cultural and political empowerment. (A forum on
culture and diversity sponsored last spring by Canada’s
minister of Canadian heritage was a case in point. It was
hosted by the First Nations filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin
and the Quebecois senator and former CBC broadcaster
Laurier Lapierre, two individuals who represent Canada’s
“founding” minorities and originators of modern identity
politics. Their role and the focus of the forum was, however,
to extend the model of inclusivity that their communities
have pushed for to the burgeoning communities
of African, West Indian, South and East Asian, and Latin
American “new Canadians.”)
Clifford’s discussion invites us to accept that certain
intellectual issues will probably also remain unresolved.
Key aspects of traditional indigenous knowledge are fundamentally
incompatible with Western traditions of
knowledge production. I am, for example, intrigued by
his discussion of the difference between the more uniform
articulation of indigenous perspectives in the Looking
Both Ways exhibit and the more explicit multivocality
of its catalogue. This duality seems to mirror the
contrast between the increasing degree of control that
indigenous people have claimed in museums, whose
unique product is the exhibit (essentially ephemeral, performative,
and “soft”), and the continuing resistance to
the unmediated authority of traditional indigenous
knowledge in the academy, the home of the book (essentially
permanent, objectifiable, and “hard”).
In this context, Clifford’s insistence on the “openended”
nature of the social negotiations he describes
should be underlined. Perhaps the most important lesson
that we should take away from his discussion is that we
are now a mere two decades down the road in a process
that is still unfolding and will continue to unfold for
years to come. In my view—and, according to my reading,
in Clifford’s—this process is progressive in the positive
sense. The value of his combination of diachronic
and synchronic analytical approaches is that it allows us
to see that this process and this progress are not only
26 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
incremental but also capacious enough to comprehend
continuing tensions, ambiguities, and ambivalences. We
should take courage from this.
joe watkins
Department of Anthropology, MSC 1040, University of
New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001, U.S.A.
(jwatkins@telepath.com). 16 ix 03
To me, Clifford’s first statement sets the theoretical
stage for his article: “The ambivalent legacy of anthropologists’
relations with local communities presents
contemporary researchers with both obstacles and opportunities.”
We anthropologists all share in the legacy
of early anthropologists. Archaeologists attempting to
consult with Native American communities often rehear
the exploits of early grave robbers like Alesˇ Hrdlicˇka.
Although archaeologists are quick to point out that there
are major differences between “grave robbing” and “archaeological
excavation,” to many American Indian
tribal groups, as Devon Mihesuah has written (1996:233),
“the only difference between an illegal ransacking of a
burial ground and a scientific one is the time element,
sun screen, little whisk brooms, and the neatness of the
area when finished.” How are we to respond to such
accusations when, in fact, regardless of who does the
digging, the disturbance and appropriation of American
Indian human remains still occurs?
Clifford’s article gives a rather skeletal presentation of
the ways in which indigenous populations and anthropologists
have been involved in negotiating the presentation
of the “indigenous” in museum exhibits and exhibitions
and leaves the context for these relationships
needing flesh. He mentions “repositioned indigenous
and academic authorities” as resulting from the undoing
of anthropology’s colonial entanglements, and I had
hoped for a more global perspective on such “undoing”
as context for his discussion of “changing Alaskan Native
identity politics.”
Of course, as an anthropological archaeologist, I am
more interested in the ways in which local populations
interact with those who interpret and report on the material
manifestations of the past. As an American Indian,
I am also interested in the ways in which the Native
voice is (or is not) included in that interpretation and
reporting. Examples of the repositioning of indigenous
and academic authorities have been recounted by Swidler
et al. (1997) and Dongoske, Aldenderfer, and Doehner
(2000), and such collaboration occurs not only in academia
but occasionally in private enterprise. Statistical
Research, Inc., an archaeological consulting firm in Tucson,
Arizona, has developed a program called “Parallel
Perspectives” that is oriented toward helping Tohono
O’odham (Native Americans of southern Arizona) students
learn about archaeology and experience the past
from both the archaeological and the traditional cultural
perspective (Carol Ellick, personal communication).
In Australia, Kirsten Brett, a student at Flinders University
in Adelaide, produced her baccalaureate honors
thesis (2001) in consultation with Barunga and Wugularr
communities in southern Arnhem Land, Northern Territory.
Indigenous custodians of the communities indicated
that youth issues such as petrol sniffing, lack of
respect for old people, and suicide attempts were due to
the children’s following “European ways” too much.
They suggested that one suitable way to address these
issues was to strengthen their indigenous culture. It was
proposed that Brett could assist in this process by developing
relevant cultural educational materials, and
this resulted in a community-centered project that created
educational materials, short-story books, and an interactive
CD-ROM based on stories told by indigenous
custodians to children about the local rock-art shelter
Druphmi. For the materials to be relevant to the children
it was essential for them to be shaped by elders, parents,
and the children themselves. This process ensured that
the non-indigenous worldview of the archaeologist did
not dominate the project.
In a critical history of American archaeology, Kehoe
(1998) argues that archaeology treats American Indians
as belonging outside of science. She also argues that scientists
act as if only they had the ability to present and
understand the processes of development of American
Indian culture and prehistory. As is evidenced by research
and projects such as those mentioned above, not
only are archaeologists beginning to share the stage in
presenting the past but some are actively trying to make
that presentation meaningful to those whose ancestors
lived that past.
Reply
james clifford
Santa Cruz, Calif., U.S.A. 12 x 03
Dombrowski, Graburn, and Leite-Goldberg wish I had
gotten more into the nitty-gritty: the money trail, institutional
interests, structural pressures, social processes
of inclusion and exclusion. I can only agree. With world
enough and time one would trace in detail the changes
in the policy of institutions such as the Smithsonian over
decades of indigenous accommodation and resistance to
academic projects. This would require attention to personal
agendas (intertwined idealism and bureaucratic realism)
as well as to matters of access and renegotiated
authority, and one would systematically study local and
regional responses to various kinds of heritage work—
different evaluations of “success” by participants and
outsiders. The local history of institutions such as the
Alutiiq Museum or archaeological projects like “Dig
Afognak” would be explored from multiple points of
view. Complex interconnections of state-level structures
with local political hierarchies, class factions, subsistence
practices, creole kinship, and religious and cultural
traditions would be analyzed. The present moment
would be narrated in discrepant and overlapping tem-
clifford Looking Several Ways F 27
poralities: centuries of colonization, adaptation, transformation,
changing economic and governmental pressures,
counterhistories of cultural “repatriation” (in
Graburn and Leite-Goldberg’s expanded sense), and ongoing
oral traditions and indigenous epistemologies. It
is unlikely that any single work could cover these bases
in a nonreductive way while leaving room, in Phillips’s
words, for “continuing tensions, ambiguities, and
ambivalences.”
Dombrowski tends to begin and end with ANSCA.
This historical context aligns his response here with the
two works I build on (2001, 2002). There can be no doubt
of the 1970 settlement’s importance, but its significance
for Native resurgence is surely not as clear as he assumes:
it presents both a problem and an opening. A longer and
less determinate historical frame is needed to account
for the range of indigenous ideologies, projects, and aspirations
active today. Dombrowski’s perspective,
strongly influenced by his specific fieldwork in southeastern
Alaska (see Kan 2003 for a corrective), tends to
view “cultural projects” with suspicion, associating
them with corporate agendas. Who benefits and who
loses? Who is excluded or “culturally disappeared”? He
is right to pose these questions, as I did in passing (unable
to answer them concretely). The edges of “Native” authenticity
and participation are always fuzzy and often
politicized. Sometimes, as in Dombrowski’s research,
the distinctions articulate with class, but they do not do
so automatically or always cleanly. Fine-grained social
analysis is needed, work that can weigh both the costs
and the benefits of specific projects and represent a range
of relative insiders and outsiders, situating them with
respect to different village, kinship, religious, and class
affiliations. Dombrowski would, I think, generally agree.
The analytic of “costs” that he uses here is, however, a
rather blunt instrument, suggesting that because cultural
activities receive resources other social priorities do not.
This may be true in particular cases. In others, funding
sources are not interchangeable: less here may not mean
more there. Moreover, as I argue, it is often problematic
to separate sociocultural from political and economic
indigenous priorities.
In a broader sense, of course, exclusion and marginalization
are part of every cultural (and social or political)
project. There can be no communal mobilization without
insiders and outsiders. Looking Both Ways articulates
an unusually open-ended, historically dynamic constellation
of identity. So does Fienup-Riordan’s evocation
of a Yup’ik “worldwide web.” Yet they have limits, and
their constitutive outsides are subject to argument and
analysis. The risk, especially for academic “experts,” is
that critical analysis slips into debunking. One needs to
balance skepticism and affirmation, tough-mindedness
and, yes, celebration. It’s a difficult, risky performance
that I certainly do not claim to have gotten right.
Graburn and Leite-Goldberg, leaning toward skepticism,
misconstrue my approach to Alutiiq ethnogenesis.
It is not the “product” of an Alaskan “identity industry,”
the latter being a dismissive phrase that closes down
awareness of the entangled agendas that I am working
to keep in sight. Identity politics (conflict and negotiation)
is not an industry (rationalized production). Capitalism,
for all its restructuring power, is not the only
important historical actor. Graburn and Leite-Goldberg
go on to say that most people who have recently embraced
Alutiiq heritage previously thought of themselves
as “Americans.” This misses a shifting array of identifications—American
and Aleut, Sugpiaq, Koniag, Eskimo,
and Russian—that are ways of refusing and supplementing
Americanness. It plays down the transformed
and transforming indigenous roots in the new
mix. For example, the Scandinavian contribution of the
early twentieth century, embodied in male fishermen
who married into local families, was absorbed and indigenized
by enduring systems of creole kinship (Mishler
and Mason 1996).
In the same paragraph they write of “Alaskan heritage
projects . . . behind which often stand pivotal figures
such as Crowell in the Alutiiq case (Lee and Graburn
2003:217) and Fienup-Riordan in the case of the Nelson
Island–Kuskokwim Yup’ik” (emphasis added). They reference
a recent discussion by Lee and Graburn of Looking
Both Ways which Dombrowski also recommends.
This review-essay, which usefully complements my account,
has little to say, however, about the collaborative
process through which Looking Both Ways was made,
at one point calling it simply “Crowell’s project.” And
it strongly reinforces Graburn and Leite-Goldberg’s focus
on “the overwhelming contribution of academics to the
construction of Alutiiq identity.” The contribution of
academics is important and an explicit theme of the
Looking Both Ways catalogue, but the image of outside
scholars exerting an “overwhelming” influence on or
“standing behind” heritage/identity projects is onesided.
As I argue, the processes that made Looking Both
Ways or Agayuliyararput possible were not a matter of
Crowell’s or Fienup-Riordan’s having an idea and consulting
advisers. Decades of prior relationships, struggles,
and collaborations were integral to the project’s coproduction.
Crowell was a crucial orchestrator, but he
acted within specific “terms of engagement,” as he puts
it in a retrospective account that documents broad-based
participation by Alutiit—especially the ways in which
elders actively shaped the project (Crowell n.d.).
Dombrowski, Graburn, and Leite-Goldberg would like
deeper attention to funding, and I certainly agree. I hesitated
to do more than identify the principal sources because
I believe that a substantive analysis of how funding
connects with articulated power in Native heritage projects
needs a more fine-grained account than I was able
to provide. A superficial account of the money trail can
be worse than nothing if it encourages simplistic assumptions
such as that source of money p dominant
power. Once we know who paid for a project, other powers
and agents appear derivative. Exxon did not, however,
create the Alutiiq Museum or significantly influence its
work. Under pressure after the oil spill, it financed something
that was already happening. The dangers of arguing
too quickly here are illustrated by Lee and Graburn’s
claim that most of the support for Looking Both Ways
28 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 1, February 2004
came “in one way or another” from the federal government.
They include all the contributions from Native
corporations simply because, decades ago, these entities
were founded with ANCSA settlement money. Of course
the agendas of Native corporations, including their often
relatively autonomous heritage projects, are not beyond
critique, but to imply that they are simply conduits of
federal funds (and influence) is as reductive as suggesting
that Looking Both Ways and the whole Alutiiq heritage
movement were inspired by academics. As I have argued,
we need to analyze intersecting social agents and interests
in a politics of articulation.
Graburn and Leite-Goldberg rightly urge more attention
to the “emotional draw” of repatriated indigenous
knowledge, the ways in which heritage provides “anchoring
identities” for displaced people cut off from
group belonging. There is much evidence scattered
throughout my article and in the essay by Alutiit in
Looking Both Ways to support such a perspective. Repatriation—including
stories, songs, food, dances, and
places as well as objects—is integral to contemporary
indigenous desires to counter and heal colonial histories,
to look back and move ahead. A historical/ethnographic
account of Native cultural revivals needs to engage with
these feelings as they are performed, selectively reconnected,
and translated in diverse settings, urban and rural,
rooted and displaced. Discussions of indigenous temporalities
(the shifting historical “weather”) might
usefully contrast an emerging sense of linear time with
repatriation’s vision of cyclical renewal and healing. The
former is evoked in a resonant essay by Graburn (1998)
that portrays the innovation by Canadian Inuit of a
dictionary, photographic records, and a local museum.
Their work is conceived as building “weirs in the river
of time,” collecting and valuing a traditional life now
flowing out to sea never to return. Looking Both Ways
and Agayuliyararput offer examples of the second temporality,
heritage (re)collections and cultural revivals in
contexts of long-term historical loss. The Alaska Native
Heritage Center represents another, more explicitly future-oriented
interactive performance of indigenous
times and places. These temporalities, which no doubt
overlap in practice, reflect different historical conjunctures,
entangled and creative ramifications of “heritage.”
Joe Watkins provides good examples of some of the
new anthropological and archaeological heritage work in
which academics play an important but no longer determining
role. There are now quite a few stories similar
to that of Kirsten Brett in Arnhem Land (or of Amy Steffian
in Kodiak). I think the “more global perspective”
that Watkins wants is implicit in my attempt to pose
local issues in a general way, and a few references to
ongoing comparative research (particularly in Melanesian
and California) do find their way into the focused
text. All the examples provided by Watkins reinforce my
overall perspective and usefully open it out.
Are the new entanglements of academics and Natives
a good thing? I’ll take a deep breath and say, with Ruth
Phillips: yes and no, but . . . yes.
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