This beaded hair ornament was obtained by an amateur white anthropologist visiting the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in northeast Kansas during the mid-1930s, a period of economic hardship. The ornament, along with other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Prairie Band items including a necklace, pouches, and a headband, is currently housed fifty miles away from the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in the collections of the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art. This striking object prompts any number of questions concerning the category centering this discussion: Native American sites of memory.
What are the various meanings that accrue to the word “site” in light of the long history of Potawatomi movement and relocation and the Prairie Band’s particular history in northeast Kansas? (See Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribal History) And what are the additional meanings that accrue to the word “site” in light of the long history of the vampiric collection of Native American possessions by amateurs and academic types alike? How does the function of the university museum as particular a site of collection, if not recollection, shape contemporary understanding of the memory held within and through such an item? And further: For whom and how does such an item—worn yet vibrant, archived in academic settings both physical and electronic—serve as a site for remembrance?
I find the tension between “site” as a stable location and the movement of the Potawatomi to be a very fruitful point for discussion. I wonder how each of our posts negotiates this tension. For example, the memorial to E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake appears stable in its location, if not stable in its meaning. And the tree is particularly interesting to me because it is at once permanent and rooted while being subject to human destruction by those who misread its significance through uprooting and climate change. Phil’s textual site of memory may also be fruitfully read in its movement through translation and transcription- speech and text.