The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See
on Jodi Byrd’s notion of how indigenous peoples provide a “transit” or conduit for Western epistemology as the objects—but never the makers—of knowledge, I am arguing that Filipinos in the American museum similarly serve as objects but never creators of knowledge.75 I would add that Filipino proximity to Native American presence in the American museum should be understood as fulfilling an important function of another kind of “transit.” Very broadly speaking, the conquest and colonization of the Philippines and Native American nations are both structured by benevolent assimilation, the rhetoric of friendship, and tutelage. Both are considered ahistorical and primitive. But I do not intend to make any easy comparison between the Philippine and the Native. As I discussed in the introduction, there is an important difference between the status of “foreign in a domestic sense” achieved by some colonies or territories like the Philippines and that of “domestic dependent nations” in the case of Native American nations. The former achieved a form of independence (although the neocolonial is embedded in the colonial), while the latter were consigned to “some sort of ‘lasting’ for others,” as Lorenzo Veracini puts it.76 I agree with Veracini and others that these are distinct if resonant modes of colonial subjugation.
Yet the real point of comparison and connection is between two genocides that have to be erased from memory and history. When the museum does not account for the physical proximity between the Filipino and the Native by explaining their historical proximity, genocide is erased. The violence of accumulation is erased, a disavowal that, as I argued earlier, inheres in the disciplines that the museum founds. The too quick dismissal of the opportunity for comparison between colonialism and settler colonialism in the Philippine case also runs the risk of disappearing the crucial role that the Philippines plays. The American colonization of the Philippines provides us with a historical and paradigmatic example of the interconnectedness between settler and military colonialisms at the turn of the last century. The Philippines was and is a pivotally ambiguous formation that performs that crucial work of interconnection.77 The Filipino was and is pivotally proximate—in time and space—to the Native. The Philippine is pivotally proximate to the Native because the genocidal war of conquest requires the notion of the primitive for its legitimacy. Moreover, the Philippines is the pivotally ambiguous formation that marks the transition between settler colonialism in the United States, typified by the Indian wars of conquest and genocide, and a transoceanic imperialism that initially deployed the genocidal logic of the Indian wars even if in the end it substituted military occupation for settlement. By attending to the event that produced the Filipino as America’s “little brown brother,” we learn much about the supple structure of colonialism(s), both its material and epistemological dimensions. The Filipino is flexible, and colonialism is supple.
The Freedom to Accumulate and the Museum’s Crisis of Representation
Like colonialism, the university museum is supple. It responds to changing epistemological shifts and has a flexible capital of holdings to enable it to do so. The UMMNH has an explicit commitment to material accumulation as the foundation for epistemological accumulation, which requires what Rosa Luxemburg calls an “unlimited freedom of movement,” a freedom that both enables and justifies the acquisition of the Filipino by the American.78 The university’s freedom of movement requires and results in the dispossession of the colonized subject, who then becomes an enclosed, ocular object of display—in other words, dispossession by accumulation.
But my main point here is that, in the case of the university museum, the expansive freedom to accumulate is admired and promoted because the university is associated with the expansion of knowledge, an endeavor that is taken to be a good in and of itself. The accumulative practices of the university museum are ideologically self-sustaining in ways that parallel Luxemburg’s argument about militarism as a “province of accumulation.”79 The military generally does not have to justify its existence and its reproduction, accumulation, or expansion of capital because it is associated with self-defense and patriotic duty. Similarly, the university generally does not have to justify its existence because it is associated with the pursuit of knowledge, a mission connected to virtue and service for the public and all humanity. The problem, of course, is, Who counts as human? The accumulation of knowledge by the American university effects and depends on the dispossession of the Filipino. Thus, the unassailable good associated with the university’s purported mission of education and the concomitant freedom to expand the horizons of knowledge turns out to be the basis for destruction, extrication, exploitation, and indenture. The university and the museum turn out to be devoted to the accumulation of knowledge by dispossession of those deemed subhuman or, in Denise da Silva’s phrasing, the transparent subject’s accumulation of knowledge by the dispossession of the affectable subject. Moreover, the museum not only accumulates but also enacts the distribution of the human between the primitive or the affectable and the developing transparent subject. The museum cannot narrate the Filipino because that would mean establishing an alternative narrative. It can only keep repeating the gesture that ties the racial, colonial primitive to the process of primitive accumulation.
With this chapter, I have tried to show that the analysis of the misrepresentation of “primitive” civilizations in the museum must be understand not merely as a question of truth or fallacy but as a process and philosophy of primitive accumulation. In the UMMNH, what actually is on display is the museum’s inability to do anything other than simply possess its Philippine connection. The massive size of the actual collection stands in striking contrast to the smallness of the exhibit. It is, simply put, a cache. Moreover, the spatial, architectural, and textual features of the museum’s top floor indicate that the museum is at a loss as to how to narrativize and locate the Philippines, especially as regards the university’s relation to the Philippines and American imperialism. Indeed, the museum is invested in not telling the history of this relationship because to do so would require revealing the university’s direct involvement in the colonization of America’s first colony in Asia. Producing its own version of what Angela Miller calls America’s “confession and avoidance syndrome,” the museum tellingly lacks historiography when it comes to the Philippines and instead tells a Philippine lack of history.80
Yet the museum can change—or, more precisely, it can be forced to change. Following a series of protests and actions by Native Americans on and off-campus—including the Native Caucus, comprising indigenous graduate students, and the student-led group called Ethnography As Activism—the Native American dioramas in the UMMNH were relabeled and then, in 2010, removed and placed in storage. The Ethnography As Activism Subgroup on Repatriation collectively wrote a paper titled “A Case for Shared Ethics: Moving Forward on Repatriation at the University of Michigan,” in which they called for the immediate halt of all research on items subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and they presented it at a 2010 graduate student anthropology conference.81 Later that year, NAGPRA was updated so as to clarify the repatriation of remains that are “not easily traced to a current tribe.”82 In 2012 the remains of 120 ancestors of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan were repatriated from the University of Michigan and laid to rest at the Nibokaan Ancestral Cemetery on the Isabella Indian Reservation.83
In the fall of 2012, a group of Philippine studies scholars that included Victor Mendoza, Deirdre de la Cruz, Christi-Ann Castro, and Joseph Galura contributed to the creation of an exhibit overlay entitled “Let’s Talk! The US in the Philippines: The Untold Story” in order to provide basic historical, political, and socioeconomic context for the Philippine exhibition and collection. According to the University of Michigan’s website, the exhibit overlay was “developed in response to the existing display, Philippine Photos & Finds: A Century of U-M Anthropology in the Philippines. The newly added labels explore some of the ways in which ideas of race informed the American colonial period in the Philippines.”84 As I write, the University of Michigan has announced that the UMMNH will be moved to a biological sciences building currently under construction and scheduled to open in 2018. The university’s zoology, paleontology, and anthropology collections are being moved to a new collections and research facility, while the future of the Ruthven Building, which houses the UMMNH, is unclear.85 Will the UMMNH be allowed to continue to disavow the relationship between the primitive and primitive accumulation, or will it be made to find and create museological alternatives that disallow that disavowal?
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