Photo courtesy of Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.
“Queen mother figure” by Ashanti artist Osei Bonsu, above, is composed of wood and gold paint.
By Oakley Marton ’25
Staff Writer
Last Thursday, Sept. 22, the kickoff event for the annual Native American Indigenous Studies Association Northeast Gathering and Five College Native American Indigenous Studies Symposium was held at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. Attendees made up of Five College NAIS faculty, students and local NAIS academics ate Wampanoag cuisine from Sly Fox Den Restaurant & Bar and concentrated in the front gallery, where they examined one of the newest MHCAM exhibits, “Considering Indigeneity.”
“I think I’ll stand [for this interview],” Sydney Nguyễn, one of the exhibit curators, told MHN following the kickoff. “I’m overexcited right now.”
Nguyễn is the current exhibitions coordinator for Smith College’s Neilson Library and formerly worked as the Post-Bacc assistant for Indigenous American collections for the Five College Consortium. She curated “Considering Indigeneity” along with Associate Curator of Visual and Material Culture and NAGPRA Coordinator Aaron F. Miller, Five College Indigenous American Collections Assistant Isabel Cordova and Claire Louise Wagner ’22.
When asked about the process of choosing the exhibit name, Nguyễn said that the curators “wanted to … really emphasize that this exhibition is a conversation. We’re not trying to tell people anything, we’re not trying to give any answers. We just want people to look at these objects and, through that lens, interrogate things that maybe they’ve never thought about before, like the role that museums play in furthering or hindering tribal sovereignty. … We wanted something that … would suggest that this is not an answer. This is merely a place to start conversations.”
Throughout the exhibit, this theme of challenging and questioning one’s perception of Indigeneity and how museums influence that perception shines through. On the MHCAM website, the exhibit description reads, “What is Indigeneity? How is it defined and who does the defining? What can museums do to acknowledge their past and present roles in this conversation — both harmful and, ideally, reparative?” Even that fundamental question of what Indigenity means is left for the audience to uncover, with artifacts pulled from many different continents challenging what the viewer considers Indigenous. “We wanted to … [show] that Indigeneity is not a finite or sure concept,” Nguyễn says. “Just like Indigenous people, it’s vast and diverse, and sometimes it conflicts.”
“We wanted to … [show] that Indigeneity is not a finite or sure concept. Just like Indigenous people, it’s vast and diverse, and sometimes it conflicts.”
One striking part of the exhibit that encapsulated these challenging questions was the empty case framed against the wall that held a description of the exhibit. Originally, the case was intended to be filled with a ceremonial bowl, but the curators had concerns that it could fall under the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. “Having … a suspicion that it could be NAGPRA, I don’t think it’s right to display it — especially [because of] the things we’re trying to say in this exhibition,” Nguyễn said. “ [Cordova] brought up [the idea, saying] ‘What if we just left an empty case to represent how collection histories are flawed, but being critical and aware and addressing them is the way to go rather than running away?’”
And so, the empty case stayed. Miller added that the goal of the exhibit was really to bring the visitor along in the significant conversations many museums are having about their relationships to Indigeneity, “conversations that we’re having internally,” he said, “that normally would be happening behind closed doors.”
Christen Mucher, a Mount Holyoke alum, associate professor of American studies at Smith College and NAIS symposium planning committee member, emphasized that this year’s theme is “museums, libraries, archives and representation in the Northeast.” She continued, “This is a really good example of the way representation in a small college’s museum … is changing,” she said, “It’s changing to specifically look at its past and trying to figure out how to be in [the] right relation in the present and also the future.”
Miller told MHN that in the coming years, MHCAM is planning to rehang its works and rethink the eurocentric focus of its permanent collection. “Considering Indigeneity,” which is made entirely of objects in the College’s permanent collection, may be a striking example of what’s to come for MHCAM.
The artifacts held in the exhibit vary, from modern portraits by Indigenous artists like Martine Gutierrez and Stan Natchez to objects like arrowheads and pottery made centuries ago by Indigenous people with artifacts from every inhabited continent, including a soapstone bowl and arrowheads acquired locally. However, the one artifact many returned to was the newest in the collection, a possum-skin cloak, created last spring as part of Assistant Professor of Anthropology Sabra Thorner’s class “Decolonizing Museums,” where students worked with Aboriginal artist Maree Clarke.
According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, “Centuries ago, Aboriginal people in the cooler climates of southeastern Australia made possum-skin cloaks to keep warm in winter and as a means of preserving ties to their communities and land, etching the insides of the garments with decorative art and maps that were designed to tell something of each person’s history.”
Photo by Oakley Marton ’25.
MHC Art Museum hosts Stan Natchez’s oil on silkscreen canvas art piece “Homage to Warhol” in “Considering Indigeneity” exhibition.
The possum cloak in the exhibit is called “Seven Sisters,” a reference to the constellation and the original seven historically women’s colleges in the Northeastern U.S. The cloak integrates the constellations and mountains of the Five College area with the traditional Aboriginal art form. The exhibit also features a slideshow of pictures of students standing in the cloak.
“It’s beautiful,” Heid E. Erdrich, an Indigenous writer and professor at Dartmouth, said. Dr. Sindiso Mnisi-Weeks, an associate professor of legal studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a focus on Indigenous law in South Africa, added, “It’s such a beautiful piece of work. I love the combination of beauty, aesthetically … and functionality as well. Then to see the students wearing it … it’s almost a transformative experience to put it on.” Erdrich echoed this sentiment. “The story behind it is so fantastic,” Erdrich continued, “The students in the robes, … you can just tell it gives people a lift.”
“The fact that [the cloak] was made here, … made by hand in such a deliberate, revived practice. It has the work of the hands of Mount Holyoke students in it and it has the work of the hands of the Aboriginal artists. To see that on the wall, taking pride of place in this exhibit, I think is really awesome,” Mucher agreed.
“I thought [the cloak] was really great because sometimes it’s hard to articulate what it means to see the land … [as] a relative,” Nguyễn said. “At least for me, a lot of that kind of relationship with my homeland is facilitated by our cultural practices, we have dances and when the season comes for certain plants, going to pick sage with my family is a thing that we do. I feel like it’s hard to articulate how we see our relationships with the lands by just saying, ‘Oh, yeah, we see them as relatives.’ It’s like, yeah, you can say that, but it’s hard to feel that and really understand that until you really engage with it in a more tangible way. So for the artists to come here and make something so beautiful with the students who could have been native or non native, I thought that was so great.”
“Considering Indigeneity” lets its visitors into a larger reckoning that museums are having with their colonial histories, through the questions that its curators hope can take root and reshape how museums and settlers interact with Indigeneity. No matter what happens, it’s clear that the Five Colleges and the surrounding area are deeply enmeshed in questions of sovereignty, legacy and ownership.
“I think the area where we’re located is a central spot in understanding the kind of crossing and migration and evolution of how Indigenous peoples in this region are related to one another and related to colonialism in this sort of long-term way that you can see visibly and can trace historically,” Edward Wingenbach, the president of Hampshire College, said at the event on Thursday, “and that has led to [a] significant ethical and moral interest in this question that is sort of parallel to the academic question.”
“Considering Indigeneity” will be at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum from Sept. 7 through May 23, 2023. Its curators hope it brings even more questions on the legacy of museums and Indigeneity.