“This is the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which is part of Harvard University. The Peabody was founded in 1866, and it is one of the oldest and largest museums focused on ethnography and archeology. In the last one hundred and fifty years, the Peabody’s collection of artifacts has grown so much that there is little space to contain them. The work of cataloging and organizing everything—even with the help of computers, bar codes, scanners, and a massive endowment—is absolutely overwhelming. The Peabody’s website has this to say about its collection: ‘The Peabody is well known for its significant collections of archeological and ethnographic materials from around the world, many of which were acquired during the era of European and American expansion, exploration, and colonization.’ This is good self-awareness on the Peabody’s part, but it doesn’t change the fact that they brought these things from the four corners of the world, and now they can’t manage it. Most of this massive collection of millions of artifacts is—as the man who spoke earlier said—hidden.”
Sophia walked them through a series of images. Human bones loose in a cardboard box. Human bones laid out on a table in the shape of a person. An Egyptian mummy in a gold-and-lapis sarcophagus. Two semicircle groupings of stone spearpoints and arrowheads fanned out on felt. Some were made of flint, some jasper, and others were knapped from obsidian. There was a magnificent robe made of blue and gold feathers, a grouping of six human jawbones, then a cedar burial box carved with bird and beaver faces.
She watched the audience carefully, the light changing on the multitude of their faces with each advancing image. Some leaned forward. Others nudged a neighbor. From time to time a phone rose, obscuring a face for a moment, replacing it with a blue glow while they posted pictures they’d taken. She tried to imagine what this photography might look like as it ascended into the cloud in real time. Then an idea came.
Sophia checked the room and saw that Thad was gone. She pointed to the image of the burial box and said, “There’s only one of these boxes. Two hundred years ago, you’d have to travel to the box to see it, and you’d have to know where to find it. In all likelihood, the Coast Salish people wouldn’t take you to see it. Travel to British Columbia at that time was difficult. You can imagine the way people must have thought that it would be so much more efficient to bring these things to the places where there were people instead of the other way around. Of course, that would be for people with money to pay the price of admission and the leisure time to attend.”
She advanced the slide to an image of the Moon House ruins, with its beautiful overhang and delicate rooms, which was threatened by over-visitation. But this image didn’t fit the new script, so she backed up to the burial box.
“This is where we get the Peabody and events like the Chicago World’s Fair and all the marvels of the Gilded Age. Suddenly thousands of people had trolley access to the world. If you think about it, museums were the internet of the nineteenth century. They gave some people—a certain kind of person—access to ethnographic treasures, but to accomplish this, they had to remove them from where they belonged and ship them off.”
Sophia could hear the people creaking in their chairs. The audience had stopped taking pictures and she could see the small white pinpoints of the projector light repeated in their eyes. She was no longer certain where she was in her presentation, but she meant to move them from the problems of museums to the half solution of national parks, and from there to the new problems parks have created.
“Let me back up,” she said. “The real first internet was probably a sixteenth-century German compendium, maybe the Library of Alexandria, but museums made a real splash. They unlocked the wonders of the world. Today, it seems hard to understand the impact because, with a cell phone, people can look at the Rosetta Stone from close up. You can hear a Sioux war song, see Indonesian dancers. You can fly virtually through the Grand Canyon, over and over and over again. Before all this, the experience had to be physical, and that took a lot of money. It was an amazing feat of the age to organize and fund explorations to send wealthy white Europeans across the globe in search of your antiquities. There’s a reason the movie was called Raiders . . .” she paused for effect, “. . . of the Lost Ark.”
Sophia wished she were recording this talk. It felt like ideas that had been rolling around loose in a box were finally coming together. She paused for a second to try to keep track, then she dove in again.
“Museums are amazing places, but they are . . .” Sophia hesitated while she tried to find the right word. This was the danger of improvisation. The right word for a graduate seminar would have been that museums were “racist” or “ethnocentric.” One of her professors would always say “Gordian,” which was only the right word for him. The correct word for this when meeting with Dalinda or other Parks or BLM people would be “multi-jurisdictional.” The term “tricky” came to mind. “Convoluted.” Maybe something folksy like “messed up.” But in the end, she settled on “complicated.” She picked up again: “Museums can be complicated. One person’s artifact is another person’s ancestor. The presence of something in a museum only points to its absence from the place it left. And this is the thing museums don’t want to say out loud. All of their holdings came from somewhere else. So, the most important questions anyone can ask are Who did this amazing thing belong to? And who had it before it was here? Who took it away from them? How did it even get here? Who had it first? And like the man in front asked before, Where are these people now? We have a word for the answers to these questions, and it is ‘provenance.’”
Sophia drank some water and scanned the room to see if anyone from the park had slipped in. She felt these visitors deserved to know what lurked behind their vacations. As she looked around the room, she met people’s eyes, and some motioned to the screen behind her.
“I’ve heard people talk about museums like they are some kind of pirate ship, but in reality, they are privateers, since their theft is so often sanctioned by the state. My father is from Alabama, but my mother comes from Iran. I grew up hearing her talk about the way her own country—and Syria, Egypt, Lebanon—was systematically plundered by the British and French. This is true of Central America, China, and Ireland—pretty much every place on the planet has had its heritage stolen and relocated somewhere else, usually accompanied by people talking about how the civilized world can help let light into the dark areas of the globe. Sometimes those places were called backward sectors. The U.S. president has other names for those parts of the world.”
A woman near the back stood and excused herself. Her husband followed a few seconds later. He stood in the doorway looking back at the screen for a lingering moment before she called for him to come.
“Some people argue that artifacts should remain in place. They can be documented best right where they are. Some say artifacts should be documented, then removed to repositories so they aren’t destroyed. Some say it’s finders keepers. Some say the people making these decisions don’t have the right to make them.”
Sophia looked down at the laptop to get her bearings, and when she looked up, she saw a raised hand. The man who raised it was slim, balding, wearing a fleece vest. He looked like the kind of person with an NPR travel mug and a Subaru. “But a park,” he said, “like this one, is just a museum in reverse, right? You aren’t taking these things anywhere, but you’re bringing all of us here to see them.”