The Problems with Collecting
People love to collect things. Indeed, the search for pretty, shiny things has existed through all stages of human history. In the 20th century, as the threat of Native American resistance to the American colonization had decreased, Americans began to look back on westward expansion with a wistful nostalgia. The frontier was romanticized and the indigenous people who were once the perceived threats of civilization, became reimagined as the “Noble Savage.” Soon, products and media in the midcentury were exploiting an image of the indigenous people that didn’t match the reality. This era also saw the expansion of a new hobby; collecting Indian artifacts.
While not as popular today as it was in the past, the collecting of Native American Artifacts is still prevalent enough that the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Historic Preservation Office actively works to reduce the acquisition and sale of ancestral belongings by so-called collectors. We do this through outreach, education, and working with law enforcement agencies. We also collaborate with government agencies and lawmakers to strengthen the rules and laws that punish looters and sellers of looted materials.
Why do we expend this amount of effort to prevent what some see as a harmless pastime? It has to do with what our mission is as the Cultural Protection Program for the Tribe; the protection of places of past and present cultural practices. To understand how combating looters and collectors fulfills this mission requires some contextual understanding of our history. Beginning with the initial contacts with Europeans, our people were exposed to diseases and changing social dynamics that saw large percentages of our population perishing. Even before we were forcibly removed from our homelands, we had already experienced loss of lifeways and connections to many of our villages and sacred places. The knowledge holders had passed to the next world, and though our people tried to reserve and pass on what remained, more was lost with each generation. In the Cultural Protection Program we rely on historical documents, living holders of knowledge, and archaeological reports to understand and protect places in our homelands. We stitch together these disparate pieces of information to form a better understanding of our past with the goal of connecting it to our present and future.
Looting and collecting actively interferes with this work because those activities remove evidence that is needed to identify and protect archaeological sites. Imagine trying to put a puzzle together, only to find that a handful of pieces were missing from the box. Now, picture someone else coming over to you while you are actively working on the incomplete puzzle and removing the coolest looking piece. Let’s take it even a step further; imagine that puzzle is missing the top of the box as well, and you aren’t really sure what the final image is supposed to look like. Our job is to put hundreds of puzzles like this together and people are constantly taking the cool pieces out of the lidless boxes. This is compounded by the trauma of our removal from our lands. Each and every one of those archaeological sites are a filament of a memory of what we have lost. Every arrowhead, bowl, mortar, net weight, and flake were made by our ancestors. Many were left in place, waiting for their creators to return to use them again; severed from the descendants of those ancestors. Every time these are removed from their resting place, we suffer another loss. We experience our connections of past to our future suffer further trauma.
If those aren’t reasons enough to fight against collecting, there is another, potentially more egregious issue with looting. For you see, while hunting arrowheads or bowls on the surface may be problematic in the ways I described previously, many artifact hunters are after the extraordinary. They want beads, wealth blades and other rare personal items. This means they loot the grounds where our ancestors were laid to rest. These grave robbers disturb and destroy the remains of our people and treating them with absolute disrespect. They are essentially commodifying their existence.
Our work is very meaningful to our team members. With each small victory we heal a bit of what our Tribe has had to suffer. Every child we educate is one less future looter. Every law enforcement action that we collaborate on is potentially a grave that won’t be dug up. Every law that we help shape is a deterrence to future looting. We recognize that while looting and collecting may never be completely ended, we can make strides towards that goal through our efforts.