Exhibition Reviews

"Crossing Cultural Fences: The Intersecting Material World of American Indians and Euro-Americans." Museum of the Rockies, 600 W. Kagy Blvd., Bozeman, MT 59717.       Temporary exhibition, Nov. 25, 2005–Oct. 2008. Daily 8–8. Adults $8, Montana State University students and children 5–18 $4, 4 and under free. 800 sq. ft. Cindy Ott, curator; Beth Merrick, exhibition designer; Bill Yellowtail, research assistant.       Internet: exhibition description, school resources, upcoming events, public programs, and online store, http://www.montana.edu/wwwmor/.
Indian identity is a contested issue on and off reservations across America. Centuries of conquest, disease, intermarriage, religious conversion, cultural assimilation, land loss, and, in some cases, termination of federal recognition have taken their toll on the collective and individual identities of American Indians. More recently, successful battles to restore federally recognized tribal status, to revitalize reservation economies through the controversial gaming industry, and to seek restitution for treaty violations and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) mismanagement have ignited controversy in Indian communities and between white and Indian neighbors and governments. Any thoughtful observer must acknowledge that American Indian societies and cultures are in constant flux. Yet persistent stereotypes remain as to what constitutes "real," "authentic," and "traditional" Indians, and tourists flood western historic sites and museums every year to gaze at feathered headdresses, beaded moccasins, tipis, cradle boards, bows and arrows, and other artifacts of "traditional" Indian culture that reinforce the notion that real Indian life ended some time in the late nineteenth century.	1
The title panel from the "Crossing Cultural Fences" exhibition presents a Crow grass dance bustle (c. 1930s). The adjacent case features a feathered headdress and hat. Photo by Michael Fox. Courtesy Museum of the Rockies.
The Museum of the Rockies, the museum of Montana State University, has plenty of those artifacts. But in the exhibition, "Crossing Cultural Fences: The Intersecting Material World of American Indians and Euro-Americans," curator Cindy Ott has sought a different kind of Indian artifact and has used juxtaposition of objects and captions that direct questions to viewers to challenge ideas of what "Indian" means in contemporary America.	2
The first case that greets the visitor holds a spectacular Crow grass dance bustle (c. 1930s). In the center rosette of the feather bustle, surrounded by silver tinsel, is a black-and-white picture of a Euro-American man and woman kissing. The photograph was obviously cut from a magazine of the time and pasted onto the center of the bustle, presumably for its decorative appeal. The accompanying label describes the meaning of a powwow where the bustle would have been worn as well as the significance of the grass dance, and it also notes that the first movie theater in Hardin, Montana, the largest town near the Crow reservation, opened in 1915. By the time a male dancer made and wore this bustle in the 1930s, Euro-Americans had been attending powwows and Indians had been watching movies for decades. Centuries of trade between the two groups had established a long tradition of material interplay. The exhibition of the bustle is designed to give viewers a visual jolt and to prompt them to shift categories of thinking that place Indians and Euro-Americans exclusively on different sides of cultural fences.	. . .