What is in a name?

What is in a name? This year, the Museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Research Specialist for Understudied Collections in Native American art, Dr. India Young, has been considering histories of collecting and currents in digital repatriation. Digital repatriation is a fairly new effort by museums and other institutions, enabled by technology, to conceptually return belongings to Indigenous peoples.

As a collection of more than 800 objects from the Northwest Coast is prepared for the Museum's online database, questions arise: what are the ethical obligations of the institution? How do Indigenous communities want their belongings accessed online? What belongings are not appropriate for digital spaces? What overtures of return can the museum activate in the digital world?

Dr. Young is looking to answer these questions by addressing the basics of museum records. An object’s archival footprint, known without irony as a “tombstone,” includes name of the artist, the artwork’s title, its date of creation, and its materiality. For the majority of historic, Indigenous belongings in museum collections these simple facts become glaring voids of knowledge. At the time of their collection, the objects’ proper appellation and the artists’ names went unrecorded. Dates might be pinned to when a work was acquired, but rarely to when it was made. Geographic classifications used by museums originated in settler-colonialism and so define Euro-American rather than Indigenous concepts of territory. Through collaboration with Northwest Coast Native communities, Dr. Young is working to title belongings in the Tlingit and Haida languages of their makers, to suggest how dates communicate institutional collecting histories, and to define materials and geographies in Indigenous terms. 

Take this figure as an example (at left). Aak’wtaatseen (Salmon Boy) represents a transformation story made to appeal to the first wave of American settlement and tourism in Southeast Alaska, by an artist from Sheet’ká Kwáan, or present day Sitka. When the story of Salmon Boy is told in Tlingit, language ties names to places with the same inseparability of Einstein to Princeton. The short, English version recalls:

A young boy had no respect for salmon, even though they are vital to Tlingit lifeways. He disrespected them by not eating them completely, by not disposing of their bones properly, and by overfishing. One day when he was swimming in a river of spawning salmon, a current pulled him into the ocean with all of the salmon spirits who had given? their bodies to feed the people and animals near that river. 

In the ocean he lived with the Salmon People all winter, where by example, they taught him to respect salmon. In the ocean, salmon looked just like humans. Salmon Boy witnessed the violence inflicted upon salmon people when humans did not treat them properly. He learned to properly dispose of salmon bones, to not overfish, and to show respect for salmon as a vital component of human life. 

In the spring the Salmon Boy returned with the Salmon People to the river. His mother caught him with a net, and immediately recognized him as her son. She took care of him as a salmon and slowly he transformed back into a boy.

He taught his people about all the appropriate ways to treat and use salmon. One spring he saw an old, tired salmon in the stream which he recognized as his salmon spirit. He speared the fished and immediately died. His people knew to return his body to the river so that his spirit could return to the Salmon People.

Princeton’s goal for digital repatriation parallel Salmon Boy’s lessons: The Museum is consulting with origin communities and listening to Indigenous directives to learn how to steward these belongings with respect. This is the beginning of an ongoing relationship of exchange, and of continued return.

India Young
Research Specialist in Native American Art