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Reviews
Arts of Diplomacy: Lewis and Clark's Indian Collection
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By Castle McLaughlin
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 2004. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 416 pages. $60.00 cloth, $40.00 paper.
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Reviewed by Peter H. Hassrick
Cody, Wyoming
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| Over the past two centuries, museums in America have become proudly multidimensional, variously acclaimed as cabinets of curiosity, sanctuaries of beauty, and repositories of history. They have thrived in their roles as stewards of culture and the natural sciences and have been recognized for their connoisseurship, for their preservationist bent and for being special and effective educational institutions. Being collections-based entities, they have differentiated themselves from other didactic organizations that are centered on classroom/professor pedagogical paradigms. Museums celebrate and use objects to inculcate public audiences. One such organization, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, has been esteemed over many generations as a premier champion of material culture and its interpretation. With its publication of Arts of Diplomacy: Lewis and Clark's Indian Collection, the Peabody Museum once again brings distinction to itself and the museum profession. Theirs is a seminal, expansive, and probing venture that has resulted in a handsome, readable, and profoundly significant volume. Arts of Diplomacy reinterprets the famous voyage of westward exploration through a critical reevaluation of the objects of discovery — those cultural artifacts that were brought home by the explorers in 1806. |
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The museum's associate curator of ethnology, Castle McLaughlin, has taken this opportunity to alter the voice regarding a rare group of Native American objects that came into the possession of the Anglo explorers. The first alteration is one of converting the active voice to a passive one, or at least an interactive one. Since many of the artifacts ended up in Charles Willson Peale's Philadelphia museum, they were thought to have been "collected" by Lewis and Clark as ethnological samples for public display and edification. McLaughlin argues persuasively that, in fact, these objects were received or exchanged as part of conscious diplomatic intercourse. Collecting specimens for scientific study was not part of Jefferson's instructions to the explorers, nor was ethnology a recognized discipline at the time. |
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McLaughlin also brings another valuable, fresh reading to those historically celebrated materials. It is, as Lewis and Clark scholar James P. Ronda notes in his foreword, the author's ability to give "voice to seemingly mute objects" as well as her determination to allow "readers [to] hear Native voices in the expedition conversation" (p. xiv). In McLaughlin's estimation, this small but remarkable group of objects such as hats, robes, ornaments, and bags represents not simply ethnographic artifacts but true demonstrators of cultural and diplomatic exchange, each with multiple layers of meaning. They were, as the author contends, generally "given to create and affirm alliances," and they were conveyed to the U.S. president because of their intended political meanings. "The explorers created a collection from the individual objects they received, but the objects themselves were selected by Indian leaders who used the gift giving to comment upon and further their own objectives with the exploring party" (p. 11). |
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The Lewis and Clark Expedition was successful in large measure because the two leaders understood that their trek was as much about nurturing social and political relations as it was about discovering new lands and surmounting physical and topographical challenges in the process. Theirs was a trip through human as well as physical geography. The fabulous objects that returned with them are, in McLaughlin's enlightened view, proof that Native peoples were not just "discoverable" but were themselves vital participants as discoverers, diplomats, and enablers who shared equally as voyagers in that epic historical adventure. |
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