Two Essays

North Andover, MA : Persimmon Press , 2005 . 196 pp. The main project in Two Essays: Chief and Greed is to critically assess the collection of American Indian material culture that was amassed by George Gustav Heye (1874–1957) during the first half of the 20th century, and for which Heye founded the Museum of the American Indian (MAI) in 1916. The Heye Collection is widely acknowledged as the largest private collection of American Indian artifacts ever to be assembled anywhere in the world. Estimates of just how large it was range from ca. 700,000 to 1,000,000 artifacts, including many irreplaceable masterpieces, from throughout the western hemisphere. Most of it was kept in storage in an annex warehouse in the Bronx, while the museum itself was located in upper Manhattan. In 1990 it was taken over by the Smithsonian Institution, and eventually relocated and re-organized as the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, DC, Suitland, MD, and in lower Manhattan. The history of the MAI is complex, and often surreal. Two Essays analyzes this history, from the beginnings of Heye's remarkable career as perhaps the world's most grandiose hobbyist, to the troubled years that followed after Heye's death, during which the author served as a trustee on the MAI board. The book is organized as its title suggests, into two essays. The essays are further divided up into short chapters, and in between each chapter are analyses of selected Indigenous artifacts that came into (and in some cases left) the MAI collection. These analyses or “inter-chapters” span some 60+ years of Edmund Carpenter's ethnological research on Indigenous visual culture. The overall design of the book itself is quite striking, and includes images of the selected Indigenous artifacts, as well as rare photographs of Heye and his associates. A second edition, also published in 2005, was prepared, that contains three additional photographs. The first essay, “Chief,” aims to portray Heye's biography and the history of the MAI, and is divided into eight chapters. The chapter titles are descriptive and to the point: George, Museum, Accessioning, Field-collecting, A Killing, Problems, Repatriation, and Surrealists. In “Chief,” Carpenter draws heavily on published sources to develop Heye's biography; especially work by Junius Bird, but also by J. Alden Mason, and E. K. Burnett. The author also draws on his personal acquaintances with some dozen or so anthropologists who had known or worked for Heye. Adjectives like voracious, extravagant, ostentatious, and insatiable are often applied to characterizations of Heye, and associated with his notorious penchants for collecting, traveling, and food. These are more than confirmed in Carpenter's portrait. The person that emerges is a man who was born into a position of enormous wealth and power, and used his position to ruthlessly surpass all others in the not-so-gentlemanly art of collecting Indian relics and artifacts. In Carpenter's view, Heye's will to collect did not stem from any scholarly or humanistic or scientific interest in the cultures and histories of Indigenous peoples in the western hemisphere. Instead, his passion or mania was for acquiring the biggest and best collection, and making the best possible deals (i.e., making a killing). There is a somber, if ironic tone in the author's account of Heye's personal sonderweg. Heye was trained as an engineer. Carpenter studied anthropology under Frank Speck. From an engineering point of view, Heye pulled off the Faustian feat of building the world's largest collection of Indian artifacts. But from an anthropological perspective, Heye created a giant disaster: he managed to pull close to a million significant and meaningful artifacts out of Indigenous communities, graveyards, and archaeological sites, and then discard most of their provenance, or worse, intentionally replace it with fabricated information. The “chief” was very much an operator. Carpenter estimates that after 1928, more than 90,000 artifacts disappeared from the Heye Collection, either through illicit sales, deaccessions, gifts, theft, and/or neglect. Because of the way Heye dealt with artifacts and operated the museum (along with the two subsequent MAI directors), Carpenter concludes it was probably one of the worst museums that has ever existed. Heye began collecting American Indian artifacts in 1897, and by 1916 organized the MAI to house his expanding collection. Although the museum was established with a board of trustees to oversee the institution, Heye appointed himself director and basically ran the operation as his own personal fiefdom. As it was Heye's money that financed everything, the board was essentially powerless, and went along for the ride. Heye lived a life that for many is difficult to comprehend. Beyond the jaw-dropping effect that often attends the descriptions of the audacities of the rich and powerful, what is perhaps most useful about Carpenter's treatment of Heye's biography is the close attention paid to the social networks through which Heye moved hundreds of thousands of Native objects. These included networks of anthropologists and archaeologists, other collectors, dealers, and the wealthy elites of New York City. The author suggests that by 1942, Heye was the leading dealer of Indian artifacts in New York City. Of particular interest here is the chapter on the surrealists, and the linkages between avant-garde art and Indigenous visual representation that often emerged in late night 1940s cab rides uptown to the “Surrealist Macy's” of the MAI annex in the Bronx, where artists shared beers with curators while picking and choosing through the collection for something to take home and inspire them in their work. One question remains after reading “Chief,” and that is, why was Heye so interested in American Indian artifacts in the first place? While it is clear he developed a mania for collecting, why these particular sorts of objects to collect, and not others (e.g., butterflies, or stamps)? This writer suspects that Heye's passion was in part fueled by American nationalism. Not that he saw himself as an imperialist, a colonizer, et cetera, but rather that he was enculturated within an American nationalist culture that was premised on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Within such a milieu, it is understandable how Heye might have seen his career choice as a no-brainer: the pickings were there for the taking. If Heye had not existed, the era would have had to invent him. The second essay, “Greed,” focuses on the aftermath of the MAI, from the time of Heye's death in 1957, until it was incorporated into the NMAI. “Greed” is the shorter of the two essays, and is divided into four aptly named chapters: Deaccessioning, Investigation, Texas, and Invincible. Here, the author is writing from the privileged insider position as one of the MAI trustees who sat on the board during some of its most difficult years (1973–85), and so was intimately involved with the inner workings of the MAI. As such Carpenter provides insights that would otherwise be unattainable. He concludes that while Heye's tenure as first director of the MAI was bad, his successors were worse. Frederick Dockstader was the director of the museum from 1960 to 1975. He was followed by Roland Force, from 1975 until its takeover in 1990. The main problem during Dockstader's tenure appears to have been excessive and inappropriate deaccessioning, which led to the MAI coming under investigation in 1974 by the New York State Attorney General. By 1975, the museum was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was clear that if it were to survive, the museum had to relocate. Three takeover plans emerged. One involved merging with the American Museum of Natural History. Another involved the billionaire (and later presidential candidate) Ross Perot, who proposed relocating the museum to Dallas. The third plan revolved around the Smithsonian Institution, and relocating the museum to the U.S. Customs House in lower Manhattan, and also constructing new museum facilities in the Washington, DC area. It is the third plan that was followed, largely through another exercise of “positional power,” which appears to have been carried out by David Rockefeller, Sr. The use of redacted names in all four of the chapters in “Greed” indicates that Carpenter's account of the MAI is not shared by the other trustees and players involved in the administration of the MAI. The redaction is explained as necessary to prevent the author from being sued for libel. Given the course of his tenure as trustee, this is quite understandable. More than once, Carpenter went to the New York State Attorney General with complaints of illegal activities taking place at the MAI. At one board meeting in 1974, Carpenter reports getting physically assaulted by a fellow trustee. His account of the MAI board's ethics during this period makes for dismal reading. Toward the end of “Greed,” the chronology of events becomes somewhat opaque. One cannot discern how the last MAI board finally terminates. Carpenter's departure from the board goes unglossed. But from what is provided in the text, one gets the sense that it did not end well. The 12 interchapters focus on specific artifacts that Heye acquired, ranging from fabricated shrunken men to masterpieces of Indigenous representation. Eight of the interchapters deal with artifacts from the Eastern Woodlands of North America. Six of those discuss artifacts having a specifically Haudenosaunee or Iroquoian provenance, which makes the work of particular interest to scholars working in this area. Carpenter describes the artifacts and their provenance, not just in terms of what happened to them after Heye acquired them, but also how they came to be collected by “outsiders,” and what may have been the original (insider) intentions of the artist toward her or his audience. These analyses stand in stark contrast to Heye's approach to artifacts, which appears to have disregarded concerns of cultural and historic context in favor of securing the best-looking specimens of a given artifact type. The analyses provide good examples of what Heye could (and should) have done, had he any real interest in preserving the cultural histories of Indigenous peoples in the Western hemisphere. The author concludes his book on a note of guarded optimism about the future of what remains of the Heye Collection, now that it has become the NMAI. “Secrecy no longer prevails,” Carpenter writes. But given the history recounted in Two Essays: Chief and Greed, one is cautioned to wait and see what will happen with time. The present work is an original contribution to the fields of museum studies, the politics of collecting culture, and the anthropology of art, and should be of use to those studying in these areas. Neal B. Keating is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Brockport where he specializes in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) art, indigenous human rights, and the politics of representation. He is the author of Pictures and Power: Haudenosaunee and Iroquoian Visual Expression, from the Seventeenth Century into the Twenty-First (University of Oklahoma Press, forthcoming), andcurator of contemporary Haudenosaunee exhibitions, including Mush Hole Remembered: R. Gary Miller (Woodland Cultural Centre, 2008), and Native Perspectives: George Longfish and Shelley Niro (Emerson Gallery, Hamilton College, 2006

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