A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
The Boasian Legacy in Northwest Coast Art Studies Aldona Jonaitis
Preface
Welcome!
Greetings! O people of all tribes.
Our thanks that we have come together in this great house.
Our thanks that we have come to view the regalia of our predecessors, the works of our past chiefs.
And, so we have come here to gather, O people of all tribes.
So that we can come to look.
You are proud, O chief—you are proud of the treasures of your ancestors, of those things that we have come to see in this great house.
I have said it!
I have said it, O chiefs.
Why should we not be proud of these things for they have been saved so that we can see them.
That is it!
That is it! O people of all tribes.
—Speech in Kwakwala by Adam Dick, translated by Bobby Joseph, a recording of which welcomed visitors to the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition “Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch.”
In October 1991 a new exhibit opened at the American Museum of Natural History. “Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch” featured the artworks that George Hunt had collected for Franz Boas at the turn of the century. At the opening, two great-grandsons of George Hunt, Bill Cranmer and Tony Hunt, stood before a crowd of hundreds of staff and visitors and proudly voiced the sentiments expressed earlier by Adam Dick in his welcoming speech.
This opening ceremony was by any definition an historic moment. More than forty Kwakwaka’wakw from Vancouver Island had traveled to New York City to validate an exhibition celebrating their ongoing artistic and ceremonial traditions.1 A leitmotif of the event was the tremendous service Boas had performed for the Kwakwaka’wakw people by recording and publishing their histories and preserving for all the artistic treasures on display at the American Museum. Descendants of Boas spoke warmly of their continued relationships with the Kwakwaka’wakw whose culture had dazzled their distinguished ancestor and continues to dazzle later generations.
I sat listening to the speeches, wondering what Boas would have thought had he been present. As his letters reveal clearly, he had a great love for these people whose culture he feared was about to disappear. He was especially fond of George Hunt, a gentle, quiet man whose brilliance has never been adequately acknowledged.2 Here, in the museum where Boas had worked for ten years trying to record for posterity the complex nature of Kwakwaka’wakw culture, were descendants of his Native friends, as well as two people he had known personally, Agnes Hunt Cranmer and William Hunt, who praised his efforts and honored his legacy. A man of immense social conscience and personal integrity, Boas had produced a vast body of scholarship informed by a commitment to prove the equality of all human beings and to encourage respect for and understanding of different traditions. Had his ghost been present in the museum’s Hall of Ocean Life where the opening ceremony was taking place, he would, I think, have been pleased. The people of New York City finally had the opportunity to observe the truth of his premise that all cultures and their material manifestations are worthy of admiration and esteem.
My first encounter with Boas came when I was in graduate school in the 1970s and read his lengthy—seemingly endless—descriptions of Kwakwaka’wakw art and culture. For someone intent on obtaining the truth about a topic, Boas was, frankly, frustrating. He provided abundant information, but never seemed to tie it up with a conceptualizing ribbon into a neat package that would enable me to understand the baroque art of the Kwakwaka’wakw. Moreover, his book Primitive Art (1927) seemed to me obscure, tedious, and of limited usefulness for my academic investigations.
Later, while researching a book on the American Museum of Natural History’s Northwest Coast Indian art collection (Jonaitis 1988a), I read his correspondences with George Hunt, John Swanton, and others and discovered behind all the scholarship a passionate, sympathetic, very real man. These letters and the wealth of materials on the Kwakwaka’wakw that Boas and Hunt left in the American Museum’s archives then became the source for documenting the artworks exhibited in “Chiefly Feasts.”3 My earlier frustration over Boas’s unwillingness to theorize and draw conclusions had turned to admiration for his devotion to meticulous documentation of the Kwakwaka’wakw, for his untiring activities aimed at collecting Kwakwaka’wakw art and artifacts, and for the social commitment that informed all of his anthropological endeavors.
This is a timely moment to evaluate Boas’s contributions to “primitive art,” for many of the points he makes correspond to concepts put forth by the so-called “new art historians” who reject the hegemony of western art styles, the isolation of art history from economic and social history, and the hierarchical and elitist divisions between high and popular art.4 As will become clear in this book, Boas’s writings on art reveal that such concepts are not new: for one who believed in the equality of all human cultures, art could not be considered inferior or superior. Moreover, his conviction that a group’s art style arose in part as a result of its cultural conditions and history contradicts the notion of an art existing in isolation from social and economic factors. And, by treating all art, by women and by men, as of equal significance, he effectively thwarts any concept of “high” art.5
Decolonization and the efforts of Native people around the globe to control their historical representation and cultural property have inspired a rethinking of the anthropologist’s role.6 Contemporary critical theorists tend to reject classics and canons, which they view as embodiments of entrenched, male, Euro-American power and thus impediments to the liberation of previously stifled voices. To make room for these new voices, it is often necessary to dethrone old authorities. It would be easy to consider Boas, often called the “father of American anthropology,” as a prime candidate for such dismissal. Indeed, some of what he wrote deserves critical analysis; however, a careful reading of his work on Native American art suggests that we take a more nuanced view. I propose that in the writings included in this volume, premised as they are on a resistance to premature theoretical closure and an egalitarian ideology, Boas created the space that Native people could ultimately occupy to assert their own voice.
It is appropriate to reassess Boas’s writings from the perspective we have gained as a result of the current crisis in representation and the reconsideration of the nature of art history and anthropology. Indeed, my own reading of his work has changed over the past several years from the moment I embarked on collecting his articles on art history for republication.7
This book has had a long history. In 1985 Janet Catherine Berlo invited me to participate in a College Art Association panel in Los Angeles on “Reevaluating Our Predecessors: Ethnographic Art Historians Look Back,” intended to assess, with an historical perspective, the contributions of some of the early interpreters of Native art. Later on that year, I was on another panel chaired by Berlo, “Native American Art History: Reassessing the Early Years,” held at the Native American Art Studies Association meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I spoke at both meetings on the political dimensions of Franz Boas’s art history.8 I found his art history so interesting that I decided to edit a book of his essays.
Preparing the exhibit for “Chiefly Feasts” consumed much of the next several years and I had to put the Boas project aside. Finally, in 1992, the quincentennial of Columbus’s “discovery” of America and a year profoundly meaningful for Native Americans as the country reevaluated its history in light of their