 you properly to what is the third research seminar this term, both of you here in the room as well as people in joining us online. This talk is a part of a series which is called In Conversation, New Directions and Art History. And the aim of the series was really to bring new research and ideas into conversation and circulation, but also to think through the approaches and methods that we build along the way, how we write interdisciplinary and thought-provoking art histories. So you'll be hearing, you have already heard and will be hearing from a range of very exciting speakers as a part of the series. We have a couple more events coming up with topics that range from art and artificial intelligence to feminist revisions of chinoiserie and today's event of Indigenous Objects in British and European Collections. So I'm going to give you a quick overview of what the evening will look like. We'll have about 15 to 20 minutes from each speaker and then about 15 minutes for the speakers to discuss each other's works, think through methodology and really how we do interdisciplinary art history and really conversation and a chat, which will be followed by a conversation and chat from questions from the audience, both online and in person. We all know how to do this. I'll read our questions from the online audience as well and we'll have a reception next door for those of us in the room. So a big warm welcome to our speakers today. Robbie Richardson's talk, Peace Pipes in Europe, Collecting the Calumet in the 18th Century, is going to be up first. This talk will consider early European collections of Indigenous tobacco pipes, often called peace pipes. Through a discussion of these objects, the talk will also discuss British representations of Indigenous diplomacy and spirituality through their understanding and collecting of the peace pipes. It will look at several of the pipes that found their ways into European collections to unravel Indigenous practices and agency. And after that we have Ruth B. Phillips talking about curiosity and belonging, legacies of 18th century collecting in the 21st century. The talk will examine two contrasting modes of engagement between Europeans and Indigenous people, peoples in 18th century North America, and how these interactions led to the formation of public and private collections. More broadly the talk will argue that restitution, if conducted in ignorance of historical circumstances or gifting or trade, risks on the one hand denying the agency of Indigenous peoples who chose to engage in curiosity production and on the other, disappearing the material embodiments of agreements that, although made long ago, still demand to be recognised and honoured. So Robbie Richardson is assistant professor of English at Princeton University and the author of The Savage in the Modern Self, North American Indians in 18th century British literature and culture, which came out in 2018. He has recent chapters in material literacy in 18th century Britain from Bloomsbury 2020 and in small things in the 18th century, the political and personal value of miniature from Cambridge University Press, also very recent, 2022. He's currently working on a monograph about Indigenous objects in the Americas and South Pacific in Europe until the end of the 18th century. And he's a citizen of the Pabinomic First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada. Robbie Phillips is professor of art history, mariter at Carleton University Ottawa, where she was also appointed to a Canada research chair in modern culture. She earned her PhD in African art at SOAS, University of London around the corner, and has since focused on Indigenous North American arts and museology. As director of the Museum of Anthropology, British Columbia from 1997 to 2002, she initiated a major renewal of the Museum's digital and physical research infrastructure, adapted to collaborative research with Indigenous peoples. And I think we'll hear some things from that today. She's the author of Trading Identities, the Souvenir in Native North Americas from the Northeast 1700 to 1900, Museum Pieces Towards the Indigenousization of Canadian Museums and Native North American Art with Janet Catherine Berlow. So without further ado, over to Robbie to start. Thank you. I would like to start by considering the premise of Indigenous objects abroad. Why and how did they get here, and what can we learn from this process and from the objects themselves? In her book, Misplaced Objects, Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas, Sylvia Spitta argues that collected objects from the Americas fundamentally challenged European epistemologies and the early modern ability to order things, but also these misplaced objects, she claims, inevitably, quote, signal the destruction of Indigenous cultures. End quote. That is to say, these collect these cultural objects can only exist here at the expense of the cultures from which they were plundered there. There's certainly some truth to this, particularly if looking, as is Spitta at the objects from Mesoamerica that arrived at the time of Columbus and Cortez into the cabinets of Europe. These were unquestionably, for the most part, the spoils of violent conquest and plunder, even when some objects were gifted by desperate Mishtech leaders. But objects from North America brought to Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries offer a different paradigm and were often in fact the currency of diplomacy or commerce, rather than conquest. Indeed, some of this material is only legible in this trans-cultural context, which I think we will explore today. Once in European collections, their provenance became obscured as the objects obtained new meaning in relation to their circulation and the material they were displayed alongside. One approach to making sense of this pattern of displacement is through thing theory, which has spawned a robust body of scholarship in 18th century studies for its interest in the ways that relationships between people and objects mediated the changing world. As Bill Brown writes, the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. Arjun Apadurai similarly argues that we have to follow the things themselves for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is after all, as he writes, the things in motion that illuminate their human and social context. Thus, in the case of indigenous material culture, tracing its circulation from sites of both domination and exchange, looking at both its manufacture and subsequent representative value, we can understand the broader social life of these objects. At the same time, I am interested in locating indigenous knowledge and agency in these items, and in their connections to living indigenous cultures and practices, or what Anishinaabe writer Gerald Visner calls, survivance. Today, I will eventually turn to one particular type of indigenous object, the tobacco pipe, and think about what we can learn from the material circulation and representation of these objects. But first, I want to step back to give some context on indigenous objects in Europe, which I hope is helpful and not too repetitive for anyone familiar or not familiar with my work. Material culture was a central mediator for understanding and interpreting the other for both indigenous people and Europeans from the earliest moments of contact. In most Haudenosaunee or Iroquois languages, the word for the Dutch is Crestoni, or metal worker, while the word for Europeans more broadly is Aserone, which translates as axe or knife maker. The Mohawk word for themselves, by contrast, is Angweonwe, or real people. As Joseph Roche notes, Native American languages record the symbolic inventiveness of the material relationships between Iroquois and Northern Europe at this historic juncture. Europeans often assumed that the integration and appropriation of their goods into indigenous societies was proof of the inherent superiority of these goods, but in fact their use value was often not a consideration. Mi'gma people, for example, traded for copper kettles and pots only to typically puncture and bury them with their kin to the consternation of French traders while continuing to use their own clay cookware. European goods were often articulations of political or symbolic power. While indigenous people integrated European goods into their cosmologies and practices, material practices, for Renaissance Europe, the objects of the New World produced a sense of wonder that can be troubling for its erasure of the colonial violence that allowed these wondrous things to cross the Atlantic. Thus, in 1520, while visiting Brussels, Albrecht Durer observed the first of the objects sent back by Cortez to Charles V from the new golden land of a Mexico, and he declared, quote, all the days of my life I have seen nothing that has gladdened my heart so much as these things. Wonder would become an ordering principle in an emerging form of collection and display in the early modern period, the Curiosity Cabinet. The Kunst or Wundukammer, as these cabinets were known in German-speaking countries, displayed singular objects from the natural world alongside works of art, classical sculpture and machines. While their organization was based more on singularity and curiosity rather than the taxonomies of later enlightenment collections, they nonetheless offered a meditation on the relation between nature and culture. The precise role of exotica in these collections was shifting and not always clear, but foreign objects were almost always crucial to the completion of any display. In the surviving inventories of early Kunstkammern, the most common descriptive term for non-European items is Indian. And though it is often impossible to tell what culture is meant to be the originator, there were indeed many items from the Americas. The position of these exotic artificial curiosities in collections was ambiguous, like the discourse of curiosity and wonder itself. Horst Bredekamp notes that exotica in early modern cabinets existed outside of the classifactory schemes of collectors and antiquarians, somewhere between the natural and artificial worlds. In 1565, the first theorist on museums, Samuel Quickeberg, proposed five principal selections around which to organize collections and placed Indian objects in two of them, suggesting they could not be accommodated to one vision within the microcosm. For the early modern European, new world objects were a challenge to fit into the classical world view. The ways of seeing the world had to be modified. While cabinets were sites of speculative learning to a certain extent, they also produced knowledge, and the slippage that saw many non-European objects labeled as Indian carried forward in the Renaissance iconography of all foreign or non-civilized cultures which was influenced by these collected curiosities. Feather work, in particular, frequently evoked this early modern vision of exoticism in early and visual culture, and geographical distance collapsed under the rubric of otherness. Feathered Indians in plays and art could be from Brazil, Virginia, or the subcontinent. Pageants in Europe deployed objects to produce spectacles of encounter, and rulers attempted to appropriate the wonder held by the material culture of the new world. Archduke Ferdinand II took feathers from a pre-Columbian headdress and placed them in his helmet worn during his second marriage. While Duke Friedrich Wurtenberg himself played the Queen of America in a carnival in 1599, complete with American weapons from his cabinet. Incidentally, I was just in Mexico, and they have copies of those feather work pieces. The originals are still in Stuttgart. What is striking is that while the vast body of material culture obviously shaped existing epistemological views, at the same time there was little desire to understand it in any terms outside of curiosity or rarity. Britain was later in accumulating indigenous objects. Unlike continental dynasties like the Habsburgs, British rulers for the most part did not maintain cabinets as microcosms of the known world. British collecting in its infancy was done by private men, often with the help of elite masters or benefactors. It was done with seemingly less methodology than on the continent and took place, as Arthur McGregor suggests, lower down on the social scale. In 1620, Francis Bacon insisted on the importance of ethnographic collecting for new knowledge. He argues in Novum Organum that it would disgrace us now that the wide spaces of the material globe, the land and seas, have been broached and explored if the limits of the intellectual globe should be set by the narrow discoveries of the ancients. Ethnographic objects represented a world not known to the classical mind and presented for Bacon an opportunity to provide, as Elaine Schnapp suggests, continuity between the discovery of the material world and the laws of human intelligence. Not long after this, John Tradeskent the Elder, gardener to various noblemen at the beginning of the 17th century, would play an important role in the institutionalization of collections into the forms that are recognizable today. Following the assassination of his employer, the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, he bought a house and established his museum known as the Ark at Lambeth. Tradeskent boasted numerous Indian objects. The younger Tradeskent took over from his father following his death in 1638 and the collection would eventually fall into the hands of astrologer and antiquary Elias Ashmole after the younger died in 1662. Ashmole had helped compile the catalog of the Tradeskent's collection which was printed in 1656 and became the first museum catalog in Britain. He would later inherit the collection rather dubiously and donate it to Oxford under his own name. This would become the Ashmolean Museum which opened as Europe's first public museum in 1683. The catalog contains numerous objects from the Americas and significantly they often appear using the North American indigenous terms which marks the start of a shift in British understandings of North American material culture. These include a canoe, tomahawks, rowanoke, and wampum peak, all variously misspelled. While the word Indian is still ambiguously used in some instances, this level of specificity for North American objects is a new development. It suggests a more sophisticated relationship with Indians and a greater shift from the aesthetic appreciation of Exotica to its ethnographic value. In other words, art objects would become specimens. While the feathered items predominantly from Mexico and South America had informed exotic iconography from their position in earlier European cabinets, the visibility and vocabulary of North American collections began to redefine the iconography of the Indian to what is still today a familiar form. Nehemiah grew's catalog of the Royal Society from 1681 similarly contains ethnographically specific details about North American Indians. He describes wampum and its use in great detail down to the specific equivalent financial value of wampum strings. Guru attempts to rationally categorize all aspects of the collection. He explains that in his description of the objects from other cultures, quote, instead of meddling with mystic, mythologic, or hieroglyphic matters as some others have done, I thought it much more proper to remark some of the uses and reasons of things. The curiosity that typifies an encounter with a cabinet of wonders unrestrained by rational history or context is reined in by Guru's text. Robert Hook would use stronger language proclaiming that the use of such a collection is not for the divertissement and wonder and gazing as Tis for the most part thought and esteemed, like pictures for children to admire and be pleased with, but for the serious and diligent study of the most able, proficient, and natural philosophy. German traveler Zacharias Konrad von Ofenbach visited the repository in 1710 and his reaction to the collection reveals the extent to which the society achieved its aim of a collection worthy of serious and diligent study. He writes that the collection is quote, not only in no sort of order or tidiness, but covered with dust, filth, and coal smoke, many of them broken and utterly ruined. Foreigners have just grounds for amazement when they hear how wretchedly all is now ordered. By the time the society's collection was donated to the British Museum in 1781, much of it was ruined by time and dirt as the repositories keeper observed in the 1760s. Similarly, the great collection of Yorkshire antiquarian Ralph Thorsby, which also contained many indigenous objects, was upon his death dispersed, some of it brought to his son's house in Stoke, Newington, but a good portion of it lay, according to contemporary sources, in a garret like a heap of rubbish, until the elements rendered it quote, like a dung hill. Notwithstanding the failures and caring for these early collections, there were numerous sites where British people might encounter indigenous objects, including museums such as the Laverian, the Ashmolean, and of course the British Museum, as well as coffee houses such as Don Salteros and Chelsea, which displayed numerous indigenous objects for over 100 years. Particular objects would come to dominate the North American materials on public display in the 18th century. These were baskets, wampum, tomahawks, and war clubs, scalping knives, and tobacco pipes. Each of these have a particular and complex history, but here I will now turn to the tobacco pipe. According to Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection of objects and specimens bequeathed to the nation upon his death in 1753 would of course become the British Museum. The very first tobacco pipes from the Americas to arrive in Britain came with Sir Richard Grenville. He writes in his natural history of Jamaica in 1707, Sir Richard Greenfield on his discovery of Virginia in 1585 found the Indians used tobacco in clay pipes for their health. Once he brought some pipes and they were made after the same fashion in England and then used very much at court. By the time of Sloane's writing this, clay tobacco pipes had become a ubiquitous commodity in Britain. Samuel Deener notes that while the Anthropocene is filled with disposable objects, the clay tobacco pipe alongside candles and print ephemera was the first such mass-produced limited-use object in the western world. Anyone who has mud-larked on the Thames can attest to the prevalence of the stems, which workshops by the early 18th century were producing by the hundreds of thousands each year from clay mind in Devonshire and elsewhere. Deener notes that the pipe in popular culture of the period became associated with the transience of life. As Tom Brown would write in 1700, every pipe you break may serve to put you in mind of mortality and let you know upon what slender accidents man's life depends. Two years earlier in 1698, the English translation of Belgian recollette Louis Hennepin's a new discovery of a vast country in America extending above 4,000 miles between New France and New Mexico featured as its frontispiece a naked Indigenous man seemingly presenting a winged tobacco pipe like Mercury's wand in Hennepin's words to European explorers. The Indigenous pipe here along with the man's Edenic nakedness to match the setting presents a welcoming vision familiar to the visual culture of colonial propaganda. Hennepin's text is one of the first to introduce into English the French word for such elaborate Indigenous pipes, the Calumet. Lahontan would explain in 1703 that quote Calumet in general signifies a pipe being a Norman word derived from Chalamot. The Indians do not understand this word for it was introduced into Canada by Normans when they first settled there and has still continued in use among the French planters. In 1721, Charlevard noted that quote Calumet is a Norman word which signifies reed and the Calumet of the savages properly is the tube of a pipe. Nonetheless, the Calumet would become in British collections a uniquely Indigenous item even though in both name and function it existed as a transcultural object. Hennepin writes this Calumet is the most mysterious thing in the world among the savages of the continent of the Northern America for it is used in all their important transactions. However, it is nothing else but a large tobacco pipe made of red black or white marble. This description would be reused in both collection catalogs and ethnographic accounts throughout the century and like other Indigenous cultural objects the significance of the Calumet was inscrutable to most British people. But by the 1730s it was understood as and synonymous with a peace pipe. Thus in Sloan's collection there are a number of Indigenous pipes with one listed as an Indian Calumet or stone pipe of peace. In Don Ciltero's coffee house by 1754 there were Indian pipes of peace on display arranged between Henry VIII's spurs and other unnamed Indian ornaments. By the 1780s it contained a plumed Calumet. What did the average Londoner think of these things as they encountered them in the smoky air of a coffee house? Some accounts suggest that Europeans sought out Calumet simply for their durability in smoking. The painter Benjamin West had a collection of numerous Indigenous objects that he painted into his works. Most notably he used this effigy pipe as a model for two of his noteworthy characters. A native man receiving a bolt of white cloth and pens treated with the Indians and what is often described as the prototypical noble savage and visual culture in the death of Wolf who ponders the great man's death with melancholy thoughtfulness. Perhaps in painting this object into history West had in mind the diplomatic and transcultural nature of the Calumet. Though accounts of his life suggest he was more interested in Indigenous people as exemplars of classical beauty and stoicism. It was said that upon gazing at the Apollo Belvedere in Rome in 1760 he declared my God how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior. It is typical that the provenance of the pipe has disappeared in the shadow of its owner. One of the more learned attempts at describing the Calumet in the period was by Thomas Pownall former colonial governor turned British antiquary. Pownall explains in 1782 the Indians quote have in general some strange mystic but undefined notion of the pervading spirit of fire and a communication of or communion in the spirit among parties contracting is with them the most solemn sacrament of the highest form. Thus the act of smoking one common pipe of tobacco among parties is a contract in one of their most sacred acts. Pownall goes on to describe these important pipes which are not their common ones but are called Calumets and are quote painted and ornamented always with feathers and generally with embroidery of porcupine quills. The Calumet is kept as the most solemn record of that treaty so made and concluded and smoked upon any future use made of or any reference to that treaty. Pownall's description is based on his experience among Indigenous nations in the Northeast and his diplomatic encounters with them. Tobacco was sacred medicine to most if not all nations in the region and continues to be used in religious practice. As Christopher Parsons notes tobacco quote was a gift to human beings to facilitate their relationships with beings with powers upon which they depended. In Mi'kmaq legend Glouscap offended by European treachery upon their arrival in North America decided to leave his homeland of Mi'kmaqi to live elsewhere. He traveled across a vast body of water by riding a whale he summoned and then gave the whale a pipe of tobacco. The whale whom Glouscap called grandfather puffed on the pipe as Glouscap watched him disappear from his new land smoke rising from his blowhole. French explorer Nicholas Perot observed Algonquian hunters in the late 17th century after having killed a bear light their pipes and put the pipe in the bear's mouth. They pushed the smoke out by the nostrils of this animal. The hunters here attempt to share the power of the plant and the spirits that control the animal is thanks and appeasement. In diplomatic pipe ceremonies between human nations the shared pipe like wampum was preserved and used to renew agreements. Pownal notes the Indians are very attentive to preserve these pipes but we who call ourselves civilized never think more of it and it is generally given away as a curiosity to some person or other. Thus indigenous material culture becomes stripped of its complexity and its collection marks the erasure of its important signification. It retreats into either typology or curiosity. He then goes on to note I had one of these Calumets which was thus lodged with my friend Sir William Johnson on a very solemn treaty with some of the western Indians it was given to me after his death he would not have parted with it is steaming it a singular curiosity perhaps unique in this country I gave it to Mr. Horace Walpole and I suppose it is in his cabinet at Strawberry Hill. In Walpole's copy of Pownal's book there was a large X beside this in Walpole's shaky hand and in the 1774 description of the Villa of Horace Walpole is listed an American Calumet. Thus the pervading spirit of fire the conduit between peoples and the spirit world becomes diminished to the armory of a gothic home in Twickenham such is the fate of indigenous objects abroad and just quickly here interestingly by this period one of the more popular British trade goods with indigenous nations was the pipe tomahawk which combined metaphors of the contact zone as a pipe and a hatchet. These two were collected in Britain and displayed as indigenous weaponry at places such as the British Museum and the Laverian Museum without any context as their conditions of production in European steel mills and forges. They became a popular gift to military leaders such as Joseph Brandt and George Washington yet their origins even still remain obscure. What can these objects tell us about the world that produced them? How is it different from objects collected in earlier and particularly later periods? Only by attending to the material record and understanding the circulation of indigenous objects can we begin to understand the complex meaning and values they embody which continue to both allude and transcend the places where they are held and the demands put upon them. Thank you. Thank you very much to the Paul Mellon Center for this lovely invitation to join you and speak to you about something that's interested me for many years and I'm really delighted to follow on what Robbie had to say. I've learned a lot from reading his work and I think I'll be a little bit overlapping but building out from what you've presented. I slightly changed the title here because as I worked with this further I kind of got a little clear about what I really see as the two modes of collecting the period so it's now called the Cult of Curiosity and the Culture of Diplomacy. So I'd like to shift the focus in this talk from the problems of meaning and representation that Robbie has discussed to the interrelated problem of collecting specifically. I'll move that is from the representation and significations of items that circulated between Indigenous North America and Europe during the 18th century to the questions of how and why they were collected. I identify two primary paradigms that shaped European collecting in North America. One grounded in the Cult of Curiosity and the other in the Culture of Indigenous Diplomacy and this slide which shows you a view of the lines at Lake George during the Seven Years' War is a sort of way of signaling this culture of diplomacy of the period. Both paradigms had emerged during the previous century but were systematized and elaborated during the 1700s through the expanded processes of commodification, trade, commissioning and gifting that accompanied the competition for colonization and political dominion in the eastern regions of North America. The transatlantic traffic in things was further accelerated by the almost continuous warfare of the long 18th century especially the three wars that followed each other in quick succession between the 1750s and 1815. The Seven Years' War, the American Revolution and the War of 1812 brought tens of thousands of soldiers into eastern North America. Virtually all of the officers and many common soldiers as well arrived primed by the period fashion for acquiring and displaying exotic curiosities both natural and artificial and with expectations shaped by stereotypes absorbed through plays, novels and the writings of the philosophical historians. And this slide which was a somewhat fortuitous discovery I made when I had a wonderful fellowship at the Clark Art Institute some years ago is a painting kind of contemporary with the Thomas Davies. It's an Arthur Divas conversation piece that shows Richard Morton with his niece and nephew and the little girl is holding a Cree basket from northern Canada very similar to one in the Sloan Collection. During the 18th century military success depended on alliances with indigenous people. Officers and colonial officials engaged in treating with indigenous leaders organized councils conducted according to indigenous protocols and rituals. The negotiations unfolded over days and weeks marked by rich visual and material presentations. Surviving letters and diaries record both the embodied nature and sensory impact of these experiences on non-indigenous participants and their potential to alter pre-existing stereotypes. And I also argue associated constructs of curiosity. For responsive individuals the result could be an enhanced understanding of indigenous traditions of diplomatic gift exchange and admiration for indigenous artistry. In such contexts of interaction and collecting in other words the cult of curiosity and the culture of diplomacy could converge resulting in new kinds of collections in which the two paradigms overlap. It's important to remember as Robbie also pointed out that indigenous people do too collected through trade and diplomatic exchange during the 18th century. In addition to the pipe tomahawks that he's discussed they acquired chief's medals, laced hats, linen shirts, shroud coats and woven belts of wampum commissioned of indigenous women by Europeans. Indeed indigenous makers were motivated to produce curiosities for the art market by their own desires for guns, knives, tea, pottery, cloths, glass beads, silver ornaments and other items of European manufacture. Although we have far less direct evidence of indigenous people's aesthetic responses, tastes and discriminations of quality than we then we do for euro-north americans the indirect evidence of the material and documentary archive is eloquent. The bi-directional dynamics and complex collecting practices of 18th century exchange and the motivations and power relations that shape them have important implications for contemporary projects of decolonization and restitution as I will argue further at the end of this talk. Let me bring these generalizations down to earth by describing the collecting activities of two young soldiers who fought in the American and British armies during the American War of Independence Captain Joseph Bloomfield and Lieutenant John Caldwell. Both men took advantage of their military service in frontier regions to collect beautifully crafted garments, wampums and ornaments. Their activities illustrate particularly well the impurity of the paradigms of curiosity and diplomatic gifting which though identifiable as distinct practices more often overlapped and intertwined. I begin with Joseph Bloomfield, son of a prominent New Jersey family whose sympathies with the American Patriots led him to join the Continental Army as soon as war broke out in 1776. As a captain in the Third New Jersey Regiment he was sent to the Mohawk Valley on what was then the New York frontier. For the first two years of the war he kept a diary whose daily entries are unusually rich with detailed descriptions of the lifestyles and appearance of the indigenous people who so clearly fascinated him, their dress, demeanor, food, music, languages and much else. Bloomfield soon accompanied officers sent into Indian territory to negotiate alliances with the Mohawk and Oneida nations who had become firmly allied to the British through the skilled work of the recently deceased Indian agent Sir William Johnson. Also figured in Robbie's talk. Attending the council Bloomfield was struck by what we might today think of as the warrior's body language of sovereignty. Quote, they set in their Indian painted warlike dress with their Indian tomahawks with pipes, the handle of the tomahawk being the tube and the head of the hatchet the bowl and smoking with such a confident air of dignity and superiority as if they were above all other beings made and their authority extended over the whole earth. Unquote. As the negotiations proceeded he further wrote, my curiosity induced me to pay a visit alone this morning to Johnson Hall. There Lady Johnson wife of the late Indian agent son quote showed me Sir William Johnson's picture which was curiously surrounded with all kinds of beads of wampum, Indian curiosities and trappings of Indian finery which he had received in his treaties with the different nations. Curiosities sufficient to amuse the curious. Unquote. Bloomfield's account is clear in its naming of curiosity as an intellectual motivator. My curiosity induced me to pay a visit as well as a term that referenced material expressions of artisanal skill and historical memory, trappings of Indian finery which he had received in his treaty and that evoked pleasurable experiences, curiosities sufficient to amuse the curious. In later diaries entries Bloomfield records his own efforts to assemble a collection. Sent to Fort Stanwyx to report on the state of affairs among members of the Oneida nation he reports that he went quote with an Indian interpreter and visited most of their huts in quest of Indian wampum etc. Back at his camp he quote rode to Fort Hendrick 12 miles from hence and got a pair of elegant leggings made in the Indian fashion unquote by Sir William Johnson's widow Molly Brandt. During the visit he admires her young daughters quote richly dressed agreeable to the Indian fashion unquote. As the summer wore on Bloomfield also commented on the broader patterns of indigenous curiosity production that went on in tandem with the formal negotiations. Quote they have their wives and children with them the wives are generally at work making moccasins and such other things as they use themselves or expect to sell to us unquote. In such passages in Bloomfield's diary the needle moves along the continuum of commodity and diplomatic gift production in the direction of the curiosity market but it moves back again later on when Bloomfield himself becomes the recipient of a diplomatic gift from an Oneida chief quote. This day to test Conidot the head warrior of the Oneidas dined with me he made me a present of a red belt or sash worked with beads as a testimony of his regard arising I suppose from my visiting him when at the Oneida castle and treating him with familiarity since he had been here unquote. Time does not permit further citation of Joseph Bloomfield's diary but I don't want to leave it without noting the numerous accounts it contains of his deeply sensory responses to indigenous expressive culture. He is struck by the different sounds of the babble of languages that surrounds him and tried to contrast the sonorous qualities of the six Haudenosaunee languages. He hears Mohawk singing in church and regards it as the most beautiful he had ever heard. He plays lacrosse with Indian men and fellow soldiers. He enjoys a dance that quote consists of violent exertions and according to some rules unquote. Some of the curiosities Bloomfield collected may be among the many undocumented 18th century items preserved in museum collections but we can today know them and the associations they would have had for him and his family only from the descriptions in his diary as colored by his richly embodied and sensory experiences and positive aesthetic responses. Both a degree of Bloomfield's curiosity about indigenous lifestyles and his respectful assessments were unusual for their time. Nigel Liesk and other scholars have explored the fundamental ambivalence with which curiosity was regarded by many intellectuals and critics during the 18th century because it could in their view easily lead to superficial disorganized and useless forms of knowledge. Yet for a man like Bloomfield whose later life testifies to his liberal political leanings and interests in what we would today call social justice an initial stance of curiosity seemed to have engendered greater degrees of understanding and respect. Bloomfield would serve several terms as governor of New Jersey in the decade leading up to the war of 1812 and he would join the Freemasons and be elected the first president of the New Jersey Society for promoting the abolition of slavery a member of the American Antiquarian Society and the board of governors of Princeton University. He also married a woman who was active in feminist suffrage during the early 19th century. John Caldwell, the son of an Anglo-Irish baronet born in Fairmanaw, Northern Ireland was three years younger than Joseph Bloomfield and in many ways his opposite number. He became a military man in the same year 1776 commissioned as a lieutenant in the eighth or king's regiment of foot which was assigned to garrison British forts that were centrist for negotiation with Aboriginal allies. The young officer was quote one of a small number of officers from his regiment employed in Indian relations unquote at the forts at Niagara and Detroit as military historian Simon Jones has written. Caldwell's father further amplified his role in a letter to a friend quote during the last four years he was principally employed in delivering the king's presence to the Indians and exchanging with them the war hatchet and wampum from an uncommon strength of constitution he was able to live with them two hunting seasons and understands their language unquote. Other accounts suggest that Caldwell took an Indigenous wife. The young lieutenant seems to have thrown himself into life on the frontier with gusto and his own letter's home expressed a boyish lust for adventure as he wrote to his father shortly after his arrival in Detroit quote I never enjoy myself more nor my health better than went on a voyage with a bear skin to sleep on and salt pork for breakfast unquote. The Ohio territory in which Caldwell served was highly unstable a region in which Americans and British competed for the loyalty of a number of linguistically and culturally diverse nations. Through Jones research we know that in the winter of 1779 to 80 Caldwell was sent into this region to win back the allegiance of tribes who were beginning to lean toward the Americans. A series of important councils was convened in January 1780 by chiefs of the Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Delaware, Shawnee and Miami. Using accounts of Caldwell's speeches and written descriptions of the now lost wampum belt that he holds in his portrait Jones demonstrates that Caldwell's grasp of Aboriginal metaphorical language and protocol enabled him to contribute to the success of the British in dissuading a prominent Cherokee leader from joining the Americans. The Caldwell collection amassed that he amassed the largest assembly of Great Lakes Indigenous artifacts that survives from the Revolutionary War years is a product of the role he played in these diplomatic negotiations. He displayed his curiosities which once included a full-sized canoe in a museum he added to his Irish estate after inheriting the baronetcy. The majority of the items that survive today were acquired by the Canadian Museum of History in the 1970s and include many of the garments and ornaments he wears in the famous portrait that he commissioned on his return from North America. As the inscription on the back of the copy that remained in the family's possession explains, it explains why the pieces in the Caldwell collection exhibit more signs of wear than similar items in other 18th century collections. It reads, Sir John Caldwell, fifth baronet, an officer of the Eighth Regiment of Foot, elected chief of the Ojibwe Indians North America and given the name Apetto or the runner as he appeared at a grand war council held by him at the Waqitomike village January 17, 1780. Caldwell's outfit would have been conferred on him during one of the adoptions that were integral to the 18th century frontier diplomacy. From an indigenous perspective adoption, ritually accomplished by the conferral of a new name and a re-clothing, made the British officer a member of an indigenous kin group who could be expected to uphold its interests in all future eventualities. The plaque attached to the frame of the second copy of the Caldwell portrait now in the Liverpool Museum suggests the British understanding of the adoption. Quote, the portrait of Sir John Caldwell, eighth baronet, the King's Regiment, who Colonel de Peister sent from Detroit to a Sandusky to require of the Shawnee, Delaware, Mingos and others to bury the hatchet at the preliminaries of peace which was signed between Great Britain and the United States 1782. Effectively, it misrepresents what was intended as an agreement of mutual support among sovereign nations as a British pacification of indigenous tribes. Typically too, for such adoptions, the new status conferred is regarded as an honor, a form of election or a kind of elevation to chieftaincy, a kind of indigenous nobility. In addition to the outfit conferred on him through adoption, Lieutenant Caldwell must have sought out other items for his collection in the curiosity market and had probably was probably given others, especially if he had a relationship with an indigenous woman. His collection too thus manifests the convergence of the cult of curiosity and the culture of diplomacy. If we again invoke the image of a needle that moves along a continuum between these two poles, the Caldwell collection as it survives today and can be read through Caldwell's portrait and the inscription can be located closer to the diplomatic end. I would argue that all the 18th century collections we can document lie somewhere along this spectrum. If time permitted, I would discuss in detail for other collections whose contents and documentation bear out this conclusion. I would situate close to the curiosity pole, the North American collection that remained until the late 20th century at Invercald, Scotland, sent to the Laird and his wife, the Lady Sinclair, by two relatives who fought in the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution. I would contrast this assemblage to the collection preserved in Wells' Somerset by the descendants of Lieutenant Andrew Foster, who was attached to the British Frontier Fort at Michelin Mackinac in the Central Great Lakes during the 1790s. Its centerpiece is a complete outfit that strongly suggests that Foster, like Caldwell, was adopted in a diplomatic ritual. And finally, I would place in between these poles the largest extent collection made by Anglo-Irish Colonel Jasper Grant and his wife Isabella. Grant would have acquired many of its components between 1805 and 1809 when he was in charge of the British Fort at Amherstburg, Ontario, and by his wife through her friendship with Madeleine Askin, the Metis wife of a prominent Detroit portrayer. The further issue that emerges from all the 18th century collections is the agency of historical actors who, although they played key roles as producers and collectors, have not been adequately recognized. I speak here of the roles of women, both indigenous and non-indigenous. We've already glimpsed the artistry and entrepreneurial activity of the Mohawk widow of Sir William Johnson, who was sought out by Joseph Bloomfield. Alexander Farquherson had also made an effort to visit the widow of a famous Mohawk leader, and one of his letters also specifies that the quote-unquote casket of curiosities that he was sending to Invercalled was intended specifically for the Lady Sinclair. I noted that Isabella Grant's friendship with the Metis wife of John Askin must have enabled her curiosity collecting, and her role is still further qualified by her will, in which she bequeathed quote, the jewels of my body and my Indian cabinet to her daughters rather than her sons. Joseph Bloomfield's wife, active in feminist causes, may also have taken an interest in indigenous curiosities as part of a taste culture associated with the couple's liberal causes that I acknowledge is speculative. I like to think so. This indigenous and non-indigenous, these indigenous and non-indigenous historical agencies are important in light of the contemporary projects of restitution associated with the decolonization of museums. If my reading of 18th century collecting practices is correct, many, if not most of the indigenous items that have come down to us from the 18th century and their documentation leads me to conclude they were, as the documentation leads me to conclude, were products of the agencies of both indigenous and non-indigenous people. They do not share the status of many items collected later that were collected under the aegis of cultural evolutionism, scientific racism, and salvage anthropology during periods when indigenous people were impoverished by colonial dispositions and oppressed by official policies of cultural genocide. And I just want to stress, this too is a continuum. I'm not trying to deny that the 18th century was a period when indigenous people were completely free to do whatever they wanted. But there is a difference in my view in the level of agency and activity that it characterizes it. So I'd like to conclude by urging that in considering the legacies of the 18th century, the museum legacies, we strive to ensure maximum access to extant collections for indigenous communities, including restitutions where appropriate. But that these actions be taken in light of accurate understandings of the histories of exchange and negotiation that lie behind them. Thank you. So, yeah. Yeah. We didn't plan this. No, we didn't. Really, we didn't talk. No. But they fit together. Yeah, definitely. One thing I was wondering about is, first of all, I completely agree about your reading of 18th century indigenous material culture. I think that of course, there is ambiguity in that sort of that curiosity as you talked about. But I'm wondering, do you think that there's a connection between those sort of soldier collectors and then what would become the kinds of more heinous collecting in the 19th century, the sort of anthropological collecting? And also, does that spectrum still exist there between whatever curiosity and diplomacy, but or is it something else? Oh, big one. Yeah. Thank you. You know, one thing that strikes me always in all the historical research I've done is that these, that the individuals that we look at when we have the ability to know something about them, they're not all the same, just people are not all the same. And they very tremendously in the empathetic abilities they have, the intellectual abilities they have, kind of curiosity they have. So yes, I think undoubtedly later on, there was, there would have been a range of different degrees of understanding, respect, interest. And I know that's true even among the missionaries who were so active in the area that I research. But I do think that as cultural evolutionism was formulated and formalized, particularly after Darwin, and became an ideological, broadly accepted ideology, that it was very hard for people to believe in the ongoing viability of indigenous communities. So this salvage paradigm was accepted even by those sympathetic individuals. And again, I think from the examples that I can think of where I know something about it, there were fair dealers and unfair dealers. There were people who did ask and for reasons of their own indigenous people would agree to sell or to sometimes give. But there's also this huge phenomenon of displacement, dispossession, poverty, which made the giving, the selling, the hopelessness that many people felt about their own cultural survival, induce them to alienate possession. So I think it is quite different. And it also depends a bit on where you are geographically and what had happened. And in your part of the world where your ancestors were, by this late 18th century, I think things had become so grim that no treaties were signed in Nova Scotia, I don't think in New Brunswick either. So people had really marginalized and impoverished. So that the production of curiosities from the early 18th century among Mi'kma was a very important economic activity. And I think it was probably less important as you moved further west. So it's just, you know, I think it's hard to, it's a really good question. What do you think? Well, I mean, I was thinking as you were talking about those men of Thomas Jefferson's collecting, you know, he writes about how he sees this burial mound on his property and he sees indigenous people still paying respect to it. He's like, I'm going to dig that up. And then he goes through and he describes, so you're digging up the skulls and then, you know, of course he collected tons of objects. I think for similar reasons to those men in some senses, but it feels a lot more pernicious when you're reading Jefferson writing about it. And I think that's maybe, I guess, the sort of unspoken difference within that as well as the stage of settler colonialism that's kind of happening in that moment, right? And again, as you say, so much of it depends on the region too. And I think also about like the later collectors in Alaska who, we've talked briefly about this before, who were literally digging up Shaman's graves in the late 19th century, but they were certainly curious. Absolutely. Just a very different form of curiosity that didn't have that same level of ambivalence, I guess. Yeah. You know, the Thomas Jefferson example is just very interesting. I'm just myself, I have to confess, some of this was sort of new to me. This whole biography of Joseph Bloomfield is something I'd love to go into more and see if there are papers one could read. But when I came across this little factoid that he had become the first president of the Society Against Abolition in New Jersey, and when you just said that about Jefferson, it just flashed across my mind. I wonder if the fact that he was a slave occulder, in terms of race, racism, and hierarchies of race, whether that actually influenced his sense of the status and stature of indigenous people as well, who by then in Virginia, I guess, were pretty much not very present. Yeah, a lot of them were almost entirely gone by that time. Yeah, I wonder what that connection is. Definitely seems like something that would be worth figuring more out about. Yeah. Jefferson was no liberal, so in that sense. Yeah, well, it's again, you know, individuals. Yeah. I was reading for this part of this research a captivity narrative written in around that period, late 18th century, just trying, sorry, my mind's gone blank on the name of the man. He was a British businessman who had come to make his fortune and started off in Virginia and then ended up trying to go through the Ohio territory during these difficult times, and he was captured and held for ransom by an indigenous family. But he kept a diary on tea papers. I've been trying to find out what tea papers were and asking, you know, specialists in this, you know, what is a tea paper? But I think I got an idea. Anyway, he kept some sort of diary, which was later published in the late 19th century, and he describes the fact that the Indian family, the indigenous, sorry, family that had captured him kept a black slave. But also that they used yellow wear pottery, drank tea, and all kinds of other, you know, this is why this was in my head when I was talking about indigenous people as collectors or acquirers, you know, that there were things that they very much valued from the material culture that came at them through in various ways. But that whole complex of the insidiousness of slavery and race mixed up with this material culture, exchanges, and I don't know, it's a very intricate parsing that you have to start doing. Do you think that if I can ask your question that the pipe tomahawk that you were speaking about, which is such an interesting item, and I know you've written about it as effectively manufactured in Europe for trade, for gifting, does it, and the degree to which it was accepted and used by indigenous people, does this imply a kind of successful translation of a European understanding of warfare and peace and the indigenous approaches to it, or does it shape what goes on in the diplomatic context because of what it looks like? Yeah, I mean it's such a strange object, like it seems kind of like incomprehensible in the 18th century, like whenever it's described, it's just described as such like a pipe tomahawk, but it doesn't reflect on, first of all, its origin and also the significance. So it's like everything has to be kind of read backwards into it. From what I could tell, and I don't know, maybe if you know more about the specific origin, but it's very murky exactly when and where it emerges. I mean it's certainly, they existed by the 1750s. We don't, there's weirdly, there's ones that say that they're from the 17th century, but they're almost certainly not. They definitely emerged kind of around that period. They were definitely, some of them were definitely made in Sheffield, which also is quite strange, but then also some were made in sort of forages in the back country and stuff like that. So I think that it, like a lot of the collecting that you're talking about, there's sort of examples of agency from both sides within them. Like I don't know that it's necessarily a successful move from European manufacture into indigenous culture or if there was a native person along the way that suggested its design or somebody in the 18th century claimed that William Penn designed the first pipe tomahawk, but I don't think that that's true. I can't imagine a Quaker designed the first pipe tomahawk, but who knows. But yeah, it is one of those kind of very, I mean again, the most mysterious thing in the world I suppose. I think part, I'm asking the question because I've been working with the central notion of translation and a project I'm working on right now. Right. And it seems to me that in this period, the Europeans were trying to, obviously they needed indigenous cooperation and alliance and trade. And so they made great efforts to figure out what indigenous values and desires were. So what could we make that you would induce you to do what we want? So there is a sort of material translation process. The other item were the chief's medals and the gorgets that are made. And I know I visited Australia some years ago and they also presented these two Australian leaders. So another aspect of this is this kind of global circulation. But the making of things is sometimes translated into another material, like metal in this case. Yeah. And I mean it's interesting too that the gorget and those medals that especially the early American state gave to indigenous leaders, that was the new pipe tomahawk that seemed to be like up until like Joseph Brandt was given a pipe tomahawk but like the Duke of Buckingham or something weird like that. It's just very bizarre that it was seen as this kind of vocabulary but then that changed. I think as conditions on the ground changed as well as warfare became less, there were new symbols had to be adopted I guess. Yeah. Well, pretty much after the war of 1812, there's no more need for indigenous alliance. Yeah. It's over then. No more treaties. We'll need you so we'll open your land up to the floods of immigrants that come in so that there's a huge change which is when it all tips start the other way. And that's when that collecting paradigm shifts as well. Yes. When anthropology becomes over the next little while. Yeah. Yeah. Graves become looted, etc. Do you find in your research much description of these garments that people acquire, the moccasins, the leggings, the I just intrigued you know from whether people respond either aesthetically or because they're exotic. Yeah. Like them or admire them or. Well, I can't remember maybe actually you wrote about this but there's a letter from the late 17th century of a man writing to his friend who's in the colonies asking can you send me some Indian clothes that I can give to my son? No. Please tell me where that's from. Yeah. I'm old enough that I've forgotten a lot to be great but I don't think I. Yeah. And it's some guy and like he's like in leads or something. Huh. And he's like can you send me so that my son can dress up as an Indian. Yeah. Which it was striking to me that this was kind of late 17th century. So already there's this kind of iconography that's happening there and he was interested in sort of the beaded beaded objects and leather and yeah. I would you would you like us to carry. I could talk to Ravi for a long time. Yeah. I mean we can actually open up to audience questions and then come back again. I have some questions of my own but I see a hand and I will be a good host. Thank you very much for two fascinating talks. I was just thinking on the subject of Jefferson he wasn't very nice to the women of his own family either. So anyway but what I really wanted to ask is you know these objects this whole vocabulary of curiosity and wonder often is so frustratingly vague. Do you have any precise either of you precise visual descriptions. I mean more particularly of the more complex objects or is that something that really happens in a later period when you get I don't know museum inventories or things. I'm just wondering at what point you move from a very generalized vocabulary to some kind of more precise visual engagement. It's probably much later but I was just wondering. Thank you. I would say and it's a good very good question that the term curiosities continues to be used generically right into the 19th century and actually you'll find it later on but the big change seems to me to come with the formalization of material culture study and the discipline of anthropology in the 19th century. I mean I'd love to know if other people here who may know more about this than either of us have an answer to that but I don't think you start getting if I understand the question. Any kind of visual description you know. Yeah. Oh well so okay well Jasper Grant and there is a catalog of this collection called patterns of power in which this letter is reproduced. He wrote his one of his brothers I mean it was a typical eldest son you know inherits the property he's the soldier his one of his brothers was Church of Ireland Ireland minister and that brother writes and asks please send us a description of Indians so he writes a very long description in which he describes the clothing in detail that may be the kind of thing you're you're getting at and it's quite a fascinating description because there are things that command his admiration for the you know the the skillfulness of the making but there are other things that he thinks are very ridiculous for example he thinks that the way that calico cloth was used for shirts as opposed to white muslin is like wearing your dressing gown into into public you know he calls it like old bed gowns I think he says or something like that he thinks that the way that the leggings have a a a seam and then a flap that is visible on the edge that that looks like you're wearing them inside out so there's there are descriptions in which the oddity of it he expresses and he in a way is a good example because he seems to have been to just set it as he saw it he wasn't dressing it up in any kind of intellectualized vocabulary so yeah there are some descriptions I guess the criteria of use rather than visualism yeah the criteria are of use I mean I just I guess I was thinking it's not really until modernism that you get any kind of aesthetic aesthetic appreciation I would imagine not in terms of formal properties or I mean you do get definite statements of great admiration for the for the artisanal skill and the fineness of the embroidery and the skill and technical things like dying colors I think you already have that virtually endure because he talks about skill if I remember that's right I'm thinking also though of some um like uh auction catalogs would would describe them in quite aesthetic terms then I guess also like Sarah Stone's watercolors of the Laverian Museum where she drew these indigenous objects so beautifully I think that would account for some kind of aesthetic appreciation for sure thank you well thank you very much for both talks very interesting really and Ruth I've got a question you mentioned that a lady wrote her will and left her Indian curiosities as she called it to her daughters did you come about did you come across various wills or was that quite common thing to do in a certain I haven't I haven't had the you know that there is a great deal more research to be done and it kind of has to be done over here by people who can get to these archives or maybe some of it's online now I did a very detailed project of research on that collection and there's a whole family papers have been well preserved in Ireland so I did have a chance to come across it and another military historian did the research on Caldwell and found those letters in which the father and the son write about their experience so that leads me to think that there's more to be found and that it would be worth looking in like the ladies in Claire I expect there are papers for that family and such so I think a lot more is to be found I don't think people have looked at the women so these are just tantalizing little things I've come across but I've come across enough of them now that I think this I'll just say Joseph Bloomfield's wife there's a museum of the American Revolution that had a show on early feminism and apparently there were a lot of women who insisted on voting in the first decade of the 19th century and she was one of them they went to the polls and voted so again I mean it's this sort of part of a larger feminist project but I wish I could give you more concrete examples but thank you can I ask another question to you please because I would like to know a little bit more about a Chelsea coffee house you mentioned and an exhibition of all these curious objects I mean how do I have to think about that or how did that look like well so I think Salter was the guy's real name but they called him Don Saltero and he was he worked for Hans Sloan and so in the beginning of the 18th century he sort of inherited all these objects from Sloan and then Salteros existed until the mid 19th century it was kind of just an institution I it's unclear first of all what was there and what survived like you know because there was sort of he claimed to have like you know an embalmed angel or you know things so I mean I don't know exactly what our Robinson Crusoe's hat is another thing that he that's so so the the I mean this is again more curiosity becomes very strange and at Bivalent and all that but actually there was quite a few coffee house collections in London that had indigenous objects and also often displayed indigenous people so much so that in the 1750s there was an active parliament that said you're not allowed to display Indians anymore if they're allied with us so there was there was this constant kind of so you know I think the average coffee house goer would encounter most of the most of those that had catalogs I think it was like Swan Salteros couple others had at least five or six indigenous objects usually a tomahawk and a pipe and wampum so they were all kind of circulating and then I assumed that probably once throughout the country probably had them as well I'm less sure of but and was it obvious to people going to the coffee house those sort of connections between like commodity coffee people objects like were these things being talked about or yeah I mean well I mean one thing that people often suggest about Salteros and maybe other similar displays is that they were kind of meant to enforce kind of empire they were sort of you know kind of propaganda for that but then again this is where curiosity becomes ambivalent where it's kind of like actually what's the slippage between mastery and wonder and all that kind of stuff so it's not entirely clear what the I mean I think most people thought that Salteros was was pretty silly like they called it like it's an essay on the spectator about it but it's interesting that in the late 18th century I don't remember who wrote it but there's some that might be correspondence with Walpole or somebody but they're talking about Salteros and other these other coffee houses as like important births of the museum like we shouldn't laugh at these places they were actually really important because they taught people how to encounter things interesting if I so I had a follow-up question that I've been thinking about through both of your talks and I I'm still thinking about it but it's an in line with thinking about how we sort of write about objects but also how and I thought Ruth maybe you'd have thoughts on this as someone who's also worked in museums and in academia I think just this a lot of what we were talking about today between sort of representation and collecting and sort of curiosity diplomacy etc there's a lot of nuance right in terms of agency but even when both parties of agency that there are histories of impoverishment the histories of as you were saying there's there's no sort of linear clear answer this was okay and this wasn't right and so and and we you talked about I think theory and object histories and things like that but I'm just curious as to where you think we're going in terms of making these kind of collecting practices evident making these kind of moments of in collecting history as well evident in museums how much can you do and and within the constraints of you know you can't write a whole thesis on a wall what you know what can you do and how can you sort of how in some sense do these object histories that maybe not don't form labels but they exist somewhere else how can they inform each other I think you definitely had experience oh well we had in Canada a truisin reconciliation commission that was a very important moment in our national um admission of of recognition of the horrors of the the residential school system that was imposed on indigenous children and their families and in its report there were 94 calls to action every sector of can of Canadian society institution was called to respond to the report and the call to museums asked the museum community to honor the UN declaration of the rights of indigenous people UN DRIP Canadian government has now adopted it fully and that took a while and the museum in Canadian museums association is trying to figure out what that means and a report was issued I think last fall called moved to action it's online if anyone wants to read it and it's very strong and very compelling and it asks for some very important things to be done but I have to say that the account of the history of collecting that is embedded in it disappointed me greatly because it telescopes for centuries of historical change in European attitudes in North American attitudes in these practices and paradigms I mean you mentioned nuance that's the good word and it it really dismisses the issue of the 18th century and before and we know much less about the 17th I mean the 18th century is a mystery the 17th century is obscure in terms of what exactly went on for North America anyway but it's I I have to say that my own understanding comes from my opportunity to work with and collaborate with indigenous scholars and knowledge holders people that we formed a after the last report that preceded that asking for reform in our ways of doing museum work we began working together in some quite productive ways and the bringing together made me understand that the recognition of these diplomatic agreements still has a lot of force and meaning and we are indeed negotiating land claims secondary claims in Canada and primary claims that go back to these treaties these agreements in which these exchanges were made the material evidence is often not this collection that's up there right now but the others that I showed and the chief's medals and the Wampums that were exchanged they are carriers of historical memory meaning and agreement and if I have understood correctly what I've learned from people that I've worked with and I really did not understand that in the earlier phases of my own research where those things are in collections it's very important to people today that they be recognized that their meanings and the historical agency of indigenous people be recognized and acknowledged and respected and then it's up to indigenous people what they think should be the status there was a exhibition at the national portrait gallery some years ago in which the four indian kings who came to london in 1710 were painted by john borrell's by order of queen ann were displayed relent and displayed and an indigenous speaker was was designated by the chiefs of the six nations the six nations community in in um ontario came to speak and he brought a replica wampum belt and held it up in the traditional manner and delivered the same kind of diplomatic message it was this two row belt that insists on the parallel authorities of sovereign nations so you know it's it's not by any means died out it's not dead it's alive and it's being in re invoked by people today and the connections to what's in museums no not everything but enough so I say that um in ultimately I do respect contemporary indigenous peoples absolutely respect their authority in deciding where the priorities lie and I think a lot of our problem with restitution is yes in many instances it's more important that something be returned where it's needed by a community in order to reclaim recover things that have been stamped out through all this oppressive history but there are other cases where what we really want is museums to help the public understand this historical record and I think when you get these sort of blanket statements in you know big policy documents whether it's the SAR the the report on museums that was commissioned by Macron um whatever it is you know it it doesn't help you know to to to kind of telescope everything is if we were looking at everything through salvage anthropology and colonial violence extreme colonial violence 19th century colonial well sorry big speech I don't know it's really helpful actually did you it's fine no I mean one of the things that I was just thinking of as you were saying that is that um I wonder why in Canada there isn't a kind of national site um of indigenous material culture we need that yeah I I mean you know having been to the Museum of the American Indian um you know my brother-in-law is Medeo and so he went to see some objects that are there and they have a special space for Medeo and people specifically to sit with their objects and you know light tobacco and all these things um even the Herd Museum which I was just in Arizona um and went there you know there's and of course not to mention all the tribal museums throughout America um but Canada just doesn't seem to prioritize that kind of site which is very confusing to me especially as you say in the wake of the TRC it may yet happen I mean the government designated the old US embassy across from the parliament buildings as an indigenous cultural space right I believe now open um but I think you're speaking more of an MAI of our very own yes and um yeah no I I think then more and more that is making more and more sense to me yeah um I have a couple of questions from the online audience actually so I'm just going to I'm going to read them out together if that's okay and then because um we're kind of slowly quickly running out of time um so one of the questions is about comparing and contrasting sort of British collecting versus um French collecting and interest before uh before 1763 um the next question actually ties back to some of the things you were already talking about um by Bradley Clements uh so I'm curious about Ruth's thoughts on the diplomacy in Curio materials considering Michael Wittgen Wittgen's ideas of categories of kin often diplomatically made as people being as being people you make exchanges with and others you do not also regarding Robbie's reference in Sir William Johnson's cabinet of curiosities Wanda Birch writes about European aristocrats requesting Indian costume for parties and such for William Johnson um so comment and question and there's one one other thing that I think actually will speak to um the the two other questions um Chloe Wigston Smith asks um or says that that she was very struck by the range of different forms of print manuscript visual culture etc could either speak uh um speak to the layering of sources needed to conjure these collections and circulation of objects both then and now and thanks from everybody as well you might have to remind us of some of those just a bit of a marathon do you want to speak Robbie um well I guess briefly the one about costumes well they're asking about the collecting there's more of a comment right but yeah but you feel free to respond yeah well I mean I know that one of the number one masquerade costumes in the 18th century was was an Indian um yeah and famously Joseph Brand, Tyna Nega went to a masquerade and people were like oh you're just an Indian but um and British and French collecting that were they were just kind of asking the Comparant contrast kind of thing was there any differences or yeah I was wondering about that with with you Ruth like would you say that in British collecting there's also that same spectrum or in French collecting again maybe my ignorance the problem the huge problem with French collecting is that during a French revolution the confiscation of the collections made by aristocrats and by the royal family was such that documentation was lost if there if it existed and we just know much less about it um I once had an opportunity by somewhat by chance in the south of France to go to the um the estate that had been owned by sorry brain dead here um the the the French general who died in in in the Seven Years War in the Conquest of Quebec oh Moncombe Moncombe sorry the estate of Moncombe and I was with another friend who was another museum person apparently there was a museum there for a long time it's now when we were there it was a rehabilitation center of some sort but there has been a history of collecting there and I was deeply curious to know what might have been there but you know um more work is being done it um by by the people like Musée de Lame um I'm sorry the cabral Lee uh and and uh on those older collections and I think more is coming out now and collaborative work that they're important projects are doing but I think the the issue is we just don't know as much my guess is that it would have been similar in from the military because this cult of curiosity was European wide you you write about that I mean that some of the most active collectors were the Brunswick quote-unquote mercenaries who fought for the British so there are fabulous things in Brownschweig and and and all over Germany from from that period so I think it would have been similar but we don't know as much about it and I hope more research will be done I'm just trying to remember other important Bradley Clemens collection yes Michael Wittkins has really explained much more about this phenomenon of ritual adoption and what kind of kinship it's a very important discussion and it's very relevant and and I completely accept his explication of what of what is incurred when you were adopted or what in the in indigenous perspective on that was question about sources and where your kind of the very broad range of sources and material manuscripts and materials oh yeah right yeah yeah I mean one of the sort of phenomenons that people talk about is the the textualization of collections which begins with the the catalog of the Tradescans and I totally rely on that because as I've talked about like the collections were particularly cared for and I think the vast majority of objects that came here don't exist anymore were left to molder and some forgotten garrots somewhere so um yeah I mean that's the only way that you can kind of reconstitute them and find these things is is that myriad of sources yeah yeah can I just add a quick comment I just want to say that reading some of Robbie's work has made me think again that when we think about these histories we really should think about both what we know of from textual sources and what we know of from material survivals together and amplify that fragmentary record in the museum with with these other descriptions it was asked earlier how many descriptive although they may not say unfortunately for us this was painted green with red stripes but it even knowing that there was moccasins and you know leggings and and wampa belts whatever it's still it's still important and to get a sense of and I think people apart from your work and a few other important works that have been done that tabulation of what's in the textual record has not really been combined with what's in the museum record and I think that is an important thing to do any other yeah I was just thinking along those lines because I was thinking that some of the keywords I've taken away from both of your talks of ambiguity curiosity and then I was thinking about intimacy you know pipes to be smoked in someone's mouth or you know when we're looking at dress when these were collected they were also worn and performed and and then entered into people's homes and became objects which we live with but then how that that that messiness of life and touch and people's bodies in this kind of intimate contact then as we get further into the 19th and the 20th century and the logics of display which I guess privilege authority and expertise and the evacuation of of life in a way to then it become the material record you would say without the kind of narration of of life and biography how then the process of restoring some of that ambiguity that intimacy which I think still isn't really perhaps allowed in the hallowed halls of the museum or you know we're still told please don't touch often for very good reason but it it sort of I was just thinking that do not touch sort of seems to go against some of the that these were touched were warm were played with were were lived with as objects and by their makers and the people that you've been talking about who became collectors as well so a bit open-ended but it really provokes they're both such stimulating talks for thinking about dealing with ambiguity and curiosity yeah and I mean that restoring that intimacy I think for a lot of indigenous communities is so important which is why like the Museum of the American Indian has the space where people can actually go and sit with and touch objects and kind of because for a lot of indigenous cultures these objects are considered to be ancestors right particularly you know certain objects I think like not not all of course but yeah definitely that intimacy is some of the best moments I've had when things started to really change in Canada about 20 years ago 30 years ago museum projects started where indigenous people were regarded as partners and and co-researchers and come into museums I went it is one project I worked on on traditions of beadwork where beadworkers came in and knew about white gloves and knew about not touching but couldn't really not try on the hat and you know the what and bless them the curators just accepted that and I've seen that over and over again and it's so important you know I mean it's it's it's breaking down and I think the origin of do not touch preserve it exactly as it is is the sense that it could never be made again but if you let people touch things and use them and wear them they will make them again yeah so you know it's a different way of thinking but thank you for for raising that yeah yeah we've time for just one quick question it's just a minor thing really I was interesting to hear about objects going the other way and you mentioned at the beginning of your talk Robbie about kettles and things being punctured and buried what's that all about and are there other examples that are the fate of European objects well the kettle specifically there's a whole kind of internal logic to it in Igmont culture but part of it was the puncture was to kill it so that it kind of released the spirit of it and then to bury it with the dead relative was because there weren't yet kettles in the sort of afterworld so it could kind of live in a in a different world but there's actually quite a few accounts of Jesuits being like what are you doing and they they insisted they sort of dig them up from the graves and use them so I mean that's that's just kind of one example but actually European goods often were grave goods for that very reason to furnish the ancestors future with objects that they didn't yet possess it's a really interesting perspective on time and I just realized perhaps a little bit too late well not too late but there's been a we've had a lot of people joining us online and a kind of rich discussion as well in the chat and with lots of links and things like that so we'll be we'll make sure to kind of pass those on to you later but kind of to have our own rich discussion in the room just really firstly to say a very very big thank you to both of you for coming here giving us your time and expertise and we can we'll move over to the next room for a reception and more questions and talking thank you