2002 Media Files Page

Articles reprinted in 2002 from contributors, newspapers and magazines in the ATADA Newsletter

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Media Files - antique and tribal art issues as seen from the point of view of the outside world reprinted from The ATADA Newsletter. You may track reports of various recent court cases as they proceeded through the US court system here.

Media Files from the Fall 2002 Issue of The ATADA Newsletter

Media Files from the Spring 2002 Issue of The ATADA Newsletter

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Archaeologists Find Mayan 'Masterpiece' in Guatemala

"Archaeologists Find Mayan 'Masterpiece' in Guatemala," read the headline for John Noble Wilford's story in The New York Times on March 14, 2002.

"Archaeologists exploring deep in the rain forest of Guatemala," the story began, "have uncovered what they think is the earliest intact wall painting of the Maya civilization. A depiction of scenes from mythology and ritual, the 1,900-year-old mural is being hailed by experts as a masterpiece.

"Even though only part of the mural has been exposed so far, scholars said the scenes and portraits promised rare insights into the society and religion of the Maya. The paintings, dated about A.D. 100, are described as more extensive and better preserved than the only other existing piece of Pre-Classic wall art. What is known as the Maya Classic period lasted from A.D. 250 to about A.D. 900.

" 'It opens a window into the mythological and courtly life of the ancient Maya,' said Dr. William Saturno, a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire and researcher at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. Dr. Saturno led the team that found the mural in a buried room at the ruins of San Bartolo, a Maya ceremonial site that was previously unknown to archaeologists, in an uninhabited part of northeastern Guatemala. The discovery is being announced by the National Geographic Society, which supported the research, and is publishing an article on the findings in the April issue of its magazine.

"Dr. David A. Freidel, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was not a team member but has studied pictures and drawings of the mural scenes. To help bring the faded mural to life and possible understanding, an artist working with the researchers has studied photographs and drawn outlines of the scenes. 'It's as fine a mural as I've ever seen painted in Mesoamerica,' Dr. Freidel said, referring to the region of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras where the pre-Columbian Maya culture thrived. 'The quality of the execution, the composition itself, the beautifully rendered faces - this is a master at work and a masterpiece of visual art.'

"Dr. Saturno said that luck and exhaustion entered into the discovery. Arriving at the San Bartolo site exhausted after a three-day journey, he sought shade in a tunnel that looters had dug near an 80-foot pyramid. He turned a flashlight on the dark tunnel wall. 'There was this Maya mural, a very rare thing,' he recalled. 'The looters had cleared off a section and left it. I felt like the luckiest man on the planet.'

"The visible part is about six feet long and more than two feet high, but this may be only 10 percent of the total painting. The archaeologists said that traces of the border and other clues suggest that the entire mural wraps around the room. Most of the room, which adjoins the pyramid, is still filled with dirt and rubble. Joining Dr. Saturno in subsequent studies of the site were Dr. David Stuart, also of Harvard's Peabody Museum, and Dr. Héctor Escobedo of the Universidad del Valle in Guatemala. They determined the approximate date of the mural by comparing its style and content with the only previously known but poorly preserved paintings from the Pre- Classic period, those from the much grander Guatemalan site of Tikal.

"In the painting, at least nine people are standing or kneeling in a scene surrounded by geometric designs. The dominant figure is a man standing and looking back over his shoulder at two kneeling women. Dr. Karl Taube, a scholar of iconography at the University of California at Riverside, said the scene may depict an important ritual in Maya mythology, the 'dressing of the maize god.'

"Dr. Freidel, a co-author of 'Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path' (Morrow, 1993), said that it was more likely that the figure was not meant to be the maize god himself, but a ruler who is impersonating the god in a ceremony of regeneration associated with the season of planting and the season of nourishing rain. 'The mural tells me that in the Pre-classic period, even before advanced writing, we see the king performing the kind of creation stories as we see later in the Classic period,' Dr. Freidel said.

But Dr. Stuart cautioned, 'The painting is so early that we are not quite sure how to look at it.' ''

High in the Andes, a Place That May Have Been Incas' Last Refuge

John Noble Wilford was back in The New York Times on March 19 with a story headlined, "High in Andes, a Place That May Have Been Incas' Last Refuge."

The story began:"Every generation or so, explorers of the high Andes of Peru come upon an elaborate sacred place or city that had been unknown to archaeologists studying the Incan civilization. The most impressive still is Machu Picchu, discovered in 1911, and no important 'lost city' has come to light since the 1960's. Not, it seems, until now.

"A team of explorers and archaeologists announced yesterday that it had found extensive ruins of a large Incan settlement 22 miles southwest of Machu Picchu. There on steep slopes, among the clouds at elevations up to 13,000 feet, were terraces, roads, cemeteries and the stones of more than 100 forsaken dwellings and storehouses. The settlement, on the mountain Cerro Victoria, is surrounded by even higher peaks, objects of worship in the Incan religion.

"Archaeologists said the site might have been a place of last refuge by the Incas, before their capitulation to Spanish conquistadors. After some Inca rebelled and nearly overthrew the Spanish in 1536, the surviving forces hid out in this remote region of Vilcabamba. They defied the invaders for 36 years, until 1572.

"The announcement of the discovery was made by the National Geographic Society, which helped pay for the exploration, and at a news conference in Lima. The team leader is Peter Frost, a British photographer who lives in Cuzco, Peru, and has spent 30 years investigating Incan archaeology. Other members included several archaeologists, led by Dr. Alfredo Valencia of the University of San Antonio Abad in Cuzco.

" 'This site may ultimately yield a record of Inca civilization from the very beginning to the very end, undisturbed by European contact,' Mr. Frost said.

"The explorers said they found pottery from two distinct periods. Some ceramics were in the style of the Incan formative period. The first Inca emerged in about 1200 in southern Peru, and their empire flourished in the 15th century, only to collapse before Spanish invaders in 1532. Other pieces of pottery are thought to be from the time of the last-ditch rebellion against Spanish rule.

" 'This is one of the most important sites to be located in the Vilcabamba region since the Inca abandoned it over 400 years ago,' said Dr. Johan Reinhard, an archaeologist of high- altitude cultures in South America, in a statement issued by the geographic society.

"The explorers first caught a distant glimpse of the site in 1999. They saw what appeared to be a sacred platform on one of the peaks. On a return expedition last June, they left the nearest road and hiked and climbed for four exhausting days.

"On the day they arrived at the site, 'We ran into an Inca wall and a complex of buildings in the definite Inca style,' Mr. Frost said last week in a telephone interview from Cuzco. 'We knew from that moment we had something special.'

"Two Indian families were found living among the ruins. But the place appeared on no maps or in any archaeological reports. Mr. Frost plans to return in June to make a detailed map of the site and conduct more excavations.

"Funeral towers - small, cylindrical structures made of stone - are a distinctive part of landscape. The explorers surmised that these might have been used for elite burials, but looters had made off with all skeletons and any grave goods. Some skeletons were found in underground tombs.

"Mr. Frost suggested two reasons people lived in such a remote, lofty place. One attraction may have been the nearby silver mines. The other was probably the view. 'It's the only place in the area that has a superb view of all the nearby snow peaks,' Mr. Frost said.'They were probably holding religious ceremonies in worship of these peaks and celestial and solar observations on these platforms to keep the Inca calendar.' "

Returning Tundra's Rhythm to the Inuit in Film: Profile of Inuit Filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk

From The New York Times on March 30, the Saturday profile was of Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk. Written by Clifford Krauss, the headline for the story read " Returning Tundra's Rhythm to the Inuit in Film," and was datelined Igoolik, Nunavut.

The story read, "Zacharias Kunuk's 'Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner),' based on an age-old Arctic folk tale, has made him a celebrity of sorts. But frankly, he would rather pass on the parties. He was invited to peddle the movie at the Arctic Winter Games this month in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut Territory, but he chose to stay home. He packed his snowmobile with an axe, a rifle and a video camera and went seal hunting instead.

"Mr. Kunuk, 44, is the first Inuk to direct a feature-length motion picture, one that was performed entirely by Inuit actors in their centuries-old Inuktitut language. The picture won him a prize for best first feature film at Cannes last year and in February won six Genies - Canada's equivalent of the Oscar - including one for best director.

"That prominence and the appearance of the first genuinely Inuit film are landmarks for the Inuit, an indigenous Asian people who crossed into North America thousands of years ago and who have made an uneven advance toward mainstream Canadian life. The Inuit, formerly referred to as Eskimos, persuaded the government to carve Nunavut from the Northwest Territories in 1999. Their language, strictly oral for centuries, has spawned an alphabet in the last few decades.

"For all his status now, life for Mr. Kunuk here in Igloolik, 125 miles north of the Arctic circle, is pretty much the same. He works in a spare office editing videotape and finds solace in a little shack that serves as a study. The shack is decorated with a plastic tropical plant, a wolf skull and the jaw of a polar bear hunted by one of his five children. Any day he likes, he can drop everything and poke around the ice cracks looking for a seal to shoot.

" 'Everything I need is right here,' said Mr. Kunuk, peering across the boundless tundra as he sipped tea, then lighted a cigarette and put on an extra layer of dog skins to keep warm in the 30-below-zero weather. 'There is no distraction and there is lots of light. Imagine doing a scene here. It could be a dog team scene, a hunting scene.'

"As if on cue, a fluffy white Arctic fox appeared over a ridge of blue ice to look over Mr. Kunuk and his three hunting companions before scurrying away. "'You see what I mean? That could have been a polar bear. Anything can happen here!'

"The Arctic is a big, blank canvas in Mr. Kunuk's hands. In 'Atanarjuat,' a nearly three-hour movie full of exquisite icy landscapes, he uses an ancient Inuit legend to show survival techniques and explore how love, hypocrisy, jealousy and revenge drive life in a community divided by an evil spirit. As the film has been shown across Canada's Arctic, entire Inuit communities have been brought to tears watching a tale that until now has been handed down from generation to generation as a bedtime story.

"Like Mr. Kunuk himself, 'Atanarjuat' is alternatively reflective and rambunctious, sorrowful and funny. The movie is playing in theaters in France and the Netherlands and is scheduled for release in the United States and Australia in June. But Mr. Kunuk says the audience he cares most about are the 40,000 Inuit who live in isolated settlements across Canada's north, especially the young people who he says do not know how to endure in the wilderness.

" 'It's about identity and showing people where they came from, but it's also about survival,' said Mr. Kunuk, whose soft brown eyes are set above cheeks weathered like black chalk by the hostile climate. 'Young people today travel from community to community, and when a storm blows we have to rescue them. They don't know where they're going, they don't bring knives or saws to build a shelter out of ice, and they don't know how to do it.'

" 'Atanarjuat' also functions as a how-to film, showing viewers how to build an igloo in a storm. This reflects how much life is changing here. People still leave frozen walrus carcasses in their front yard for hungry neighbors. But supermarkets and automated teller machines are quickly taking root.

"Mr. Kunuk and his art are a product of this revolution. He was born in a shack of frozen moss as the fourth child of 12, and was taken from his parents by the government so he would go to school. 'I saw a little bit of that old way before I was dragged to school people living in sod houses, hitching their dogs, and fathers going off for the day hunting,' he said. 'And what else do you need? When I was 7, I didn't worry about money or grades or how I looked.'

"His mother, Vivi, had a particularly lasting effect on him with her gripping night-time storytelling and her personal connection to Inuit mysticism. She grew up as the adopted daughter of a woman who lost one child after another in childbirth because of the curse of a jealous shaman, Mr. Kunuk said.

" 'I believe in shamans,' he said. 'If it were up to me, I would go back to the law of the Inuit, the law of nature. I would live like that while checking e-mail in the morning, calling halfway around the world to do business, watching wars in my living room on television. It is possible to do both in this day.'

"The idea of picking and choosing from distinct cultures as if they were platters on a buffet, Mr. Kunuk acknowledges, is not entirely practical. Yet the choices he has made are full of paradoxical twists. He rebelled against Canada's socialization plans by dropping out of school after the eighth grade. But he was attracted to the cowboy films shown in Igloolik.

"Mr. Kunuk began his artistic endeavors as a carver of soapstone. In 1981, he traveled to Montreal to sell some sculptures and came home to Igloolik with a video camera. It took him two months to figure out how to get the color balance right but Mr. Kunuk went out anyway to document the adventures of hunters in black and white. A year later, the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, an independent production company, opened an office here and hired Mr. Kunuk as a cameraman. In 1990, he co-founded Igloolik Isuma Productions, the first Inuit production company, to make a series of television and museum videos and short documentaries.

"Making 'Atanarjuat' wasn't easy. There were interruptions in funding, flash snow storms and the death from cancer of Paul Apak Angilirq, the scriptwriter, in the middle of the shoot. But in the end, Mr. Kunuk said, 'shooting it was the most fun we could have.' "

Exhibition includes masks, quills, moccasins, Haida ceremonial pipes

"Stanford is first stop for tour of Indian art Exhibition includes masks, quills, moccasins, Haida ceremonial pipes," read the headline for Jesse Hamlin's story in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 30, 2002. The story reads: "Some extraordinary works of Native American art go on display May 8 at Stanford's Cantor Center for Visual Arts, the first stop on a five-city tour of 'Uncommon Legacies: Native American Art from The Peabody Essex Museum.'

"The exhibition features about 100 pieces from the Salem, Mass. Museum, which has one of the oldest and most extensive collections of indigenous art in the United States. The objects include a bold painted-wood Bella Bella mask from the 1840s and an 1835 Chippewa-Ojibwa baby carrier exquisitely crafted with wood, cloth, quills, beads, leather and shells. There are Iroquois moccasins, an Aleut overcoat made with mammal intestine and dyed esophagus, feathered Brazilian headdresses and an early 19th century Haida ceremonial pipe with whales, bears, hawks and humans carved in argillite.

" 'Many old assumptions and viewpoints regarding Native American art need to be retired,' writes Dan L. Monroe, executive director of the Peabody Essex Museum, in the exhibition catalog. Native American artists have always 'adopted new forms of expression and materials in response to ever-changing conditions. Thus the notion of "traditional" Native American art is a fiction.' "

The show is on view 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday (until 8 p.m. Thursday). Admission is free. (650) 723-4177.

Museum Joins With Tribe to Expand Exhibits

"Museum Joins With Tribe to Expand Exhibits," was the headline for James Sterngold's May 16 story in the New York Times.

Datelined Los Angeles, the story began, "After years of struggling with obscurity and financial problems, the Southwest Museum, one of the country's finest collections of American Indian artifacts, is on the verge of announcing a broad but disputed financial partnership with a local Indian tribe.

"The deal, which the museum's board is expected to approve on Friday, would be the first such arrangement between a highly regarded museum and an Indian tribe, in this case the Pechanga Band of the Luiseño Indians. The tribe operates a casino 85 miles south of here, near San Diego, and under the deal it would build a museum there to house rotating displays of objects from the Southwest's collection.

"Museum officials expressed delight with the deal, which would provide much-needed financial support while maintaining the museum's independence and more than doubling the number of objects on exhibit. The Southwest, in the Mount Washington neighborhood, now has room to display only about 2 percent of its 350,000 objects. The deal would also give the museum a tangible connection with descendants of some of the people who created the artifacts in its collection.

"But the arrangement, negotiated for more than a year and chosen over several alternatives, has come at a price. Several long-serving members of the Southwest board have resigned in anger. [ATADA member] James Phillips, a former treasurer of the board who said he was forced out in recent months, said he felt the museum's finances had been badly mishandled and that the deal with the Pechangas was motivated largely by a desire to preserve the positions of board and staff members. Under the deal, the Pechangas would provide several hundred thousand dollars a year in operating subsidies to the Southwest, in addition to paying for construction and operation of their new museum.

"Mr. Phillips said he much preferred a deal negotiated last year with the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, a wealthy museum here that has a large space but what is considered a mediocre collection. The two museums had a written agreement to join last year. The Autry's board approved the deal, which would have formed a combined board on which Autry directors would have formed a majority, but the Southwest Museum dropped the matter.

"Federico Jimenez, an art dealer and another former Southwest board member, said he recently resigned because of his dismay over the arrangement. He said he was concerned about a deal that would rotate so much of the Southwest's collection out of Los Angeles to the Pechanga's untested museum rather than the well-run Autry museum. 'I just resigned rather than do it this way,' Mr. Jimenez said. 'I feel the museum is in jeopardy.'

"Southwest Museum officials argue that the deal offers the best possible choice because it would maintain the autonomy and identity of the oldest museum in Los Angeles and preserve its current site.

" 'What it really does is it advances our mission, getting our collection out of storage,' said Michael Heumann, a lawyer and the chairman of the board. 'The money would allow us to operate at a higher level.' Mr. Heumann added that no board member had expressed misgivings at meetings.

"Allan Parachini, a consultant hired to help the museum evaluate its choices, said that while the museum had struggled in the past, 'what is different this time is there is a real chance, a high probability that it has turned the corner.' Mr. Parachini said the deal satisfied one of the board's highest goals, preserving the management and oversight structure, keeping the board as it is.

" 'This will not change things here, and that was important to the board,' said Duane H. King, the museum's executive director.

"The Pechanga tribe, which has about 1,400 members, operates a casino near Temecula. The tribe is building a 522-room hotel and casino at the site, and under the deal would construct a separate cultural center that would house exhibitions from the Southwest's storerooms.

"The Southwest Museum was founded in 1907, making it the oldest in the city. It has a vast array of artifacts from Indians of the Plains, the Southwest and California and the Northwest, many collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But it has only about 75,000 visitors a year and an endowment of about $4 million. The Southwest has thus been trying to preserve its historic hilltop site, between downtown and Pasadena, while shoring up its finances. It has talked with many institutions about some kind of affiliation, including the Smithsonian Institution."

Pechangas Delay Pact With L.A. Museum: The tribe wants more information before allying with the struggling Southwest

And, on the same subject, a May 20 story from the Los Angeles Times by Christopher Reynolds with the headline "Pechangas Delay Pact With L.A. Museum: The tribe wants more information before allying with the struggling Southwest."

"The Pechanga Indians," the story began, "of Temecula on Sunday hesitated on the brink of a pioneering deal to provide up to $1.3 million yearly to the cash-strapped Southwest Museum in exchange for the loan of thousands of artifacts. That decision represents the first setback for a museum building plan that was assembled over a year of negotiations between tribal leaders and museum officials, an alliance that museum authorities say would be the first of its kind. The proposed contract, which was approved Friday by Southwest Museum trustees, is intended as the initial step in a plan to build a Pechanga museum and cultural center near the tribe's casino.

" 'The general membership wants more information,' tribal spokesman Butch Murphy said Sunday. The concept might need 'another approach' and until then, 'we're in a holding pattern,' he said.

"Michael Heumann, president of the Southwest Museum's board of trustees, called the decision 'understandable. We spent lots of time getting comfortable with this agreement, and they should have a chance to do the same,' he said.

"Sources close to the talks said the 20-year loan agreement would allow the Pechangas to build a museum larger than the Southwest's, the most important museum showcase for Indian art and artifacts west of the Mississippi River. The Pechangas would pay the museum $750,000 yearly until completion of the new museum's opening-an estimated five-year project-and $1.3 million annually after that. About 200 tribal members were at the meeting, which included about three hours of discussion, Murphy said. He said he was unsure when the proposal would be revisited.

"Leaders at the Southwest, whose budget last year was $2.3 million, welcomed the deal as a chance to free the 95-year-old institution from chronic funding shortages and find a wider audience for its 350,000-piece collection, about 98% of which is in storage. Though some Southwest supporters warned that the proposal could undercut the museum's control of its collection, trustees approved it on a 15-1 vote, with one abstention and eight trustees absent.

"Pechanga leaders, who have run a prosperous casino since 1995, have described the proposal as a chance to celebrate their heritage-and bolster their reservation's list of visitor attractions. But after questions persisted at Sunday's meeting, leaders decided to table the proposal.

" 'I don't see it as a problem. We're under no firm deadline,' said Duane King, executive director of the Southwest Museum. 'I think that they simply want to make sure that they can afford this, given all of the other things they're doing.'

"Next month, the tribe will open a hotel-casino at an estimated cost of $270 million. Pechanga leaders haven't made any public estimates yet on the cost of building the museum. In previous votes, the Pechanga membership has approved the concept of building a museum and the idea of approaching the Southwest Museum about a collaboration.

"Sources said the proposed contract between the museum and tribe leaves unspecified the number of artifacts the Pechangas might borrow, but acknowledges that prior agreements with donors will keep many pieces from ever leaving the Southwest Museum.

"The Southwest Museum, headquartered in Mount Washington, is the oldest museum in Los Angeles and its collection of Native American artifacts from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries is considered the largest of its kind outside a government institution."

New Travails for a Struggling California Museum

More trouble for the Southwest Museum is described in James Sterngold's May 26 story in The New York Times, "New Travails for a Struggling California Museum."

"Sterngold's story began, 'The long-troubled Southwest Museum, the country's largest and most important collection of Indian artifacts outside government hands, is suddenly facing new uncertainties that could accelerate a steady, if little understood, deterioration of its finances.

"A close look at the museum's public financial records and internal documents provided by people who contend that the museum has been mismanaged for years shows that its finances and even its collection appear to be in perilous condition.

"The problems include financial losses, a shrinking endowment, plummeting attendance and inadequate, potentially dangerous, storage facilities for a highly regarded collection of 350,000 Indian artifacts, most of which sit in obscurity. The collection is largely stored in rooms with outdated electrical wiring, no sprinkler system, no environmental controls and little protection from earthquakes, a consultant's report says.

"Experts around the country have long worried about the threats to the collection and have been eager for the museum to find a permanent solution. The problems recall those experienced years ago by the George Gustav Heye Foundation of New York, which had a collection of Indian artifacts eventually absorbed by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian.

"The Southwest Museum is proud to be the oldest here and to provide a connection to the native roots of a city with the largest urban population of Indians in the country. But the museum's board has faced obstacles and delays in finding a merger or financial partner to help secure its future.

"Now the fourth such effort in recent years has hit a snag. The board recently approved a deal with a wealthy local tribe, the Pechanga Band of the Luiseño Indians. Under the terms, the tribe would provide more than a million dollars a year and the museum would lend the tribe a large number of artifacts for a museum it plans to build at a casino it operates near San Diego.

"Last week the tribe unexpectedly voted to table the plan indefinitely when some members asked for more information about the museum and the arrangement. Museum officials contend the deal, which has been in negotiations for a year, will be concluded. But Duane H. King, the museum's executive director, acknowledged that the uncertainty could be damaging. Last year, Mr. King said, when a proposed affiliation with the Autry Museum of Western Heritage here fell through at the last minute, some important donors pulled back until the future became clearer. Mr. King said that appeared likely to happen again, and he added that even the infusion of money from the Pechangas would not be enough to solve all the museum's problems.

"W. Richard West, the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, which has also spoken with the Southwest about an affiliation, said he hoped the deal with the Pechangas worked. But he described it as merely a bridge until a better solution was found. 'It would give the Southwest some breathing space,' said Mr. West, who added that the museum had survived through a heroic effort. Mr. King insisted that a burst of fund-raising over the last year had helped counter some of the Southwest's problems, and he said some of the financial data were misleading. But the museum's records show signs of trouble.

"For instance, internal documents appear to contradict the museum's public reports of annual attendance. The Southwest has long said it has 75,000 visitors a year at its small, out-of-the-way location in the Mount Washington neighborhood. But internal records show that attendance has been plummeting, to 13,800 in the year that ended June 30, 2000, from 22,000 in the year that ended June 30, 1996. Mr. King said the figures had been rising more recently. He acknowledged that the museum receives fewer than the 45,000 visits by children on school tours reported each year.

"In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2000, the museum reported a loss of $1.4 million, after a $456,000 loss the previous year. For the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2001, the museum reported a surplus of $727,000.

"Mr. King said the museum's net assets were a better reflection of its health. But even that has declined, to $6.9 million last June 30 from $8.1 million on June 30, 1998. The endowment has withered to $3.4 million this year from $6.4 million in 1994, according to internal reports. Year by year, the museum has been using money from the endowment for operations, its tax returns and other documents indicate.

"Mr. King called this an accounting issue, saying the museum had been advised that some parts of the permanent endowment could be reclassified and spent for operations. The net result is that the museum has almost no financial cushion. By contrast, the Autry museum has an endowment of about $100 million. 'It's not a secret to anyone that the Southwest is a struggling organization,' Mr. King said. 'Some association with another institution is probably inevitable. We've been operating on meager budgets for almost 100 years, and we'll continue to do so.' "

A Backwoods Tanner Follows Indian Ways

From The New York Times on May 26, "A Backwoods Tanner Follows Indian Ways" by Blaine Harden was datelined Polebridge, Montana.

"Lee Secrest lives 45 miles off the electricity grid" the story began.

"He eats only meat that he shoots, cooks only with wood that he chops and sleeps comfortably only in a log cabin that he built.

"His girlfriend, Amy Edmonds, a wildlife biologist, calls him Subsistence Man. He looks the part, being bearded and broad-shouldered and having a tendency to get the nervous sweats when strangers come to call.

"When it comes to brains, however, Mr. Secrest, 52, needs outside help. "Neighbors do what they can. A man down the road periodically leaves fresh deer, antelope or elk brains in a sandwich bag in Mr. Secrest's mailbox. The mail carrier, who comes on Tuesday and Friday, has gotten used to it.

"Still, Mr. Secrest's need is so great that, every month or so, he has no choice but to set aside his subsistence-man principles, drive about 50 miles south on a dirt road and buy cow brains from a butcher. 'I really do prefer wild brains,' he said, 'but in my brain bucket you'll usually find beef.'

"Mr. Secrest is a brain tanner. For more than 30 years, he has been scraping, drying, freezing and stretching the hides of deer, antelope, elk and mountain goat. He has then subjected those hides to an 18-stage American Indian tanning technique, which includes a long soak in his brain bucket. The fatty acid in brain tissue breaks down the natural glue that holds fiber together in animal hide, giving Mr. Secrest's best leather a buttery, baby's-bottom smoothness. The leather is as light as wool, nearly as thin as cotton.

"He sells most of his hides (his total tanning output is just 1,994 hides) to costume restorers. They, in turn, use it in museums to reconstruct American Indian ceremonial clothing from the 18th and 19th centuries. Mr. Secrest also sells to movie costume designers. His leather adorned some of the actors in 'Dances With Wolves.' In recent years, Mr. Secrest has begun painting geometric designs (inspired by the work of Northern Plains Indians) on the leather he tans. He has sold some of his painted work for $5,000 per hide.

"Since 1978, brains, hides and hard work have allowed Mr. Secrest to indulge his obsession for off-the-grid subsistence here in one of the most inaccessible corners of Montana, eight miles south of Canada. He owns 20 acres of mostly forested land in the North Fork Valley of the Flathead River. The flood-prone North Fork, an icy river with whitefish, bull trout and cutthroat, chortles on the edges of his property. To the east, across the river, is Glacier National Park, where the snow-covered massif of the Livingston Range lords over his land.

"A bad dirt road separates Mr. Secrest and his few hardy neighbors on the North Fork from a development boom that in the last decade has made Flathead County one of the fastest-growing places in Montana. To keep that road unpaved, to hold back the mansions springing up in the lower valley, Mr. Secrest often drives two and a half hours to Kalispell, the county seat, for planning board meetings.

" 'Some of my neighbors don't understand what could happen if the developers get access up here,' said Mr. Secrest, who said he knows what to fear, having grown up in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, where''my childhood campgrounds are now condos.'

"So far, the planning board is holding the line. The road to Mr. Secrest remains unpleasant. It is periodically impassable in the northwest Montana winter, which is snowy, cold, overcast and very long. The bad weather and bad road suit Mr. Secrest. Winter is his busy season, a time when he works outdoors in below-zero weather, taking advantage of mountain cold to freeze-dry his hides. When a hide freezes in the open air, he said, it expands, which helps break down its fiber and prepares it for the final softening procedure - an overnight soak in the brain bucket.

"Mr. Secrest stumbled on brain tanning while studying wildlife biology at the University of Montana in Missoula. In 1971, a classmate let him touch a brain-tanned hide. 'It was shown to me in an instant that this would be my life's work,' said Mr. Secrest, who views commercial tanning processes, which use strong chemicals, as an aesthetic and spiritual insult to an animal's hide.

"As the decades have gone by, Mr. Secrest has even grown fond of the smell of brains boiling in the kitchen. 'Smells like money,' he said.

"His girlfriend is much less enthusiastic. Ms. Edmonds, who has shared Mr. Secrest's cabin for six years, has asked him to buy a hot plate for his workshop and urged him to boil his brains out there. Mr. Secrest says he is mulling over this request."

Antiquities Dealer Is Sentenced to Prison

"Antiquities Dealer Is Sentenced to Prison" read the headline of Celestine Bohlen's June 12 story on Frederick Schultz in The New York Times.

"In a case that has been closely watched by the art world," the story began, "a prominent Manhattan antiquities dealer was sentenced yesterday to 33 months in federal prison and fined $50,000 for his role in a conspiracy to sell antiquities stolen from Egypt. Frederick Schultz, 48, a New York gallery owner and former president of National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art, will be allowed to remain free pending his appeal.

"In a stern statement, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan rejected the defense's arguments that Mr. Schultz was unaware of the legal risks and called him 'an ordinary thief in every conventional sense of that word.'

"The stiff sentence, coming after Mr. Schultz's conviction on Feb. 12, is seen as a sign of the federal government's determination to crack down on the trade in ancient objects that have been illegally taken out of their countries of origin. In the last decades a number of countries rich in archaeological treasures, including Egypt, have banned the export of antiquities. The Schultz case established that Americans who deal in those illegal exports may be found guilty of trafficking in stolen property.

"As part of the sentence, Judge Rakoff ordered Mr. Schultz to return to the government of Egypt an Old Kingdom bas relief depicting a family with geese, now in the custody of the F.B.I. According to testimony at the trial, the relief had been illegally acquired from corrupt members of Egypt's antiquities police and was offered for sale by Mr. Schultz for $60,000.

" 'The Arab Republic of Egypt has been gratified by this prosecution because they believe that this is very important to their worldwide efforts to deter the theft of Egypt's patrimony,' said Lawrence M. Kaye, a lawyer for the Egyptian government.

"Buyers and sellers in New York and London, the centers of the world antiquities market, have been paying greater attention to issues of provenance since the trial began. 'Throughout the world, all people who would consider getting involved in the acquisition of antiquities will have to think much more carefully since the possible consequences have been spelled out in this case,' said Mr. Kaye, who has also represented Turkey and other foreign governments in civil cases involving stolen antiquities.

"In reviewing the statements filed on Mr. Schultz's behalf by his wife, members of his family and friends, Judge Rakoff said he was convinced that Mr. Schultz had 'very strong familial and personal values.' A number of people - including Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, where Mr. Schultz's father had worked - had written of Mr. Schultz's generosity, loyalty and also of his naïvté.

"The defense also offered evidence that Mr. Schultz, a graduate of Princeton University, had erroneously told a 1996 meeting of the American Association of Appraisers that the United States does not recognize patrimony laws of foreign countries, 'just as we do not recognize their civil code such as divorce laws, nor foreign exchange restrictions, nor other export restrictions.'

"But these arguments did not persuade Judge Rakoff. 'The court,' he said, 'was convinced by the evidence in the trial that the defendant knew he was stealing, in every sense of the word, those objects, and I say that with regret.'

"The defense lawyers had also argued that the value of the antiquities cited in the case was less than $70,000, a sum that would have lowered the seriousness of Mr. Schultz's offense and would have made him eligible for probation. Judge Rakoff stuck with the higher valuation - more than $1.5 million - offered by the federal prosecutors, which carries a minimum sentence of 33 months.

"Mr. Schultz sat quietly through proceedings yesterday morning and later comforted crying family members and friends. David Spears, his lawyer, refused to comment on the sentence, saying an appeal would be filed.

"In its presentencing report, the probation department suggested that Mr. Schultz be sentenced to the maximum term of 41 months and be fined $570,434 because he had failed to show remorse for his actions.

"During the trial last winter, held before Judge Rakoff, Mr. Schultz argued that he had been duped by a British antiquities dealer, Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, who had sold him items that he said came from an old family collection. But Mr. Tokeley-Parry, who was convicted in Britain in 1997 on charges of handling stolen property, testified in court that Mr. Schultz had actually helped concoct the story of the old family collection and had assisted in the manufacture of false labels that obscured the origins of objects that had been recently smuggled out of Egypt.

That Face: Enamored of a Mask

Next, a love story. The lover: auctioneer Simon de Pury. The object of his affections? The headline for David Colman's story in The New York Times on June 30 read "That Face: Enamored of a Mask."

"Lust is like lightning: no matter how well you insulate yourself against it, it can still strike hard. A year ago today, Simon de Pury found out just how hard," the story began.

"Last spring, Mr. de Pury, the chairman of the Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg auction house, was flipping through a catalog when he was struck by a face in the crowd. In this case, it was an African Punu mask. Serene and haunting, it was carved in 19th-century Gabon but has features that seem incongruously East Asian, an impression intensified by a whitish face and red accents, reminiscent of Orientalist maquillage.

"Mr. de Pury, whose interest in personal acquisition is modest when set against the lavish art and artifacts he traffics in, is circumspect when it comes to raising his own paddle. When he is so moved, it is often by a contemporary artist he deems underrated (and undervalued), like Christopher Wool, known for dry-humored text paintings, or Rosemarie Trockel, a German conceptual artist with a flair for subversive knitwear. He is also an expert dabbler, seeking out a bit of everything from Ethiopian aboriginal shields and headrests to 1950's French Moderne ceramics to cheap plastic superhero figurines. Never before had he spent more than about $20,000 on a single piece of art for himself.

"But nothing had prepared him for the Punu mask, which had not only presence but provenance. It was part of the collection of Hubert Goldet. Mr. Goldet, who died in 2000, was a towering figure in the field of tribal art, and this was widely considered the most important African art sale since Helena Rubinstein's holdings were auctioned in 1966.

" 'When I saw the Goldet catalog, I experienced total shock - un coup de foudre,' Mr. de Pury said, using the French for thunderbolt. He did his homework, reading about the mask's composition, its condition, the various collectors who had owned it over the decades. Then he went to Paris to see it in person. There, he fell totally under its spell.

" 'It's hard to explain the magnetism it had,' he said. 'It had a presence and beauty like nothing I've ever seen before. It's not always the collector who chooses the object. Sometimes the object chooses the collector.'

"And sometimes the object flirts with more than one. At the auction, on June 30 in Paris, the wooden mask - once used in mourning ceremonies and considered one of the three finest such masks in existence - raced past its estimate of 600,000 to 800,000 francs (about $78,000 to $104,000 at the time). 'It was down to me and one other person,' Mr. De Pury recalled. Back and forth between the two men, the bids rose until finally, at 3.5 million francs ($453,000), the gavel came down and the mask was his.

"Mr. de Pury doesn't have a permanent apartment - his most dependable address is a hotel in London, Geneva, Paris or New York - and so a year later he has yet to live with his expensive purchase, which is stored in a vault in Switzerland.

" 'I do hope to live with it someday,' he said, sighing as he pondered a photograph of the mask on the blond Florence Knoll desk in his minimalist office on 57th Street. 'But I can see it so clearly in my mind. For now, it's all right.' "

Indian Work Surpassing Tribes and Traditions

"Indian Work Surpassing Tribes and Traditions," read the headline for Grace Gluek's New York Times review of a show of contemporary American Indian "art, craft and design." Ellen Napiura Taubman was an organizer if the show.

"Like goodies at an American Indian feast," Gluek's review began, "more than 200 contemporary craft objects - weavings, pottery, jewelry, glass, sculpture, paintings and tableware - are spread out at the American Craft Museum in a highly appetizing show.

"Titled 'Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation,' the show displays recent works by about 90 established and emerging Southwestern artists chosen for their venturesome challenges to the traditional and tribal. Reflecting new directions during the last few decades, it stresses artistic innovation and a personal approach. Among the better-known talents are the ceramic artists Richard Zane Smith and Nancy Youngblood Lugo, the weaver Ramona Sakiestewa and the jewelers Mike Bird-Romero and Yazzie Johnson.

"The goal is to demonstrate that contemporary Indian art, craft and design can no longer be considered backwater, but are a potent tributary of the mainstream. Although many of the objects use traditional craft mediums and techniques, their makers tend to look more to the present and the future than the past.

"The curators hope the show will help redefine the artists' creations as 'art rather than artifacts,' so they are no longer pigeonholed with the ethnographic and anthropological, said David Revere McFadden, chief curator of the museum and an organizer of the show with Ellen Napiura Taubman, the former head of Sotheby's department of Indian art.

"And this extravaganza of sleek pots, witty sculptures, ultrasophisticated jewelry, lively weavings and such tends to support his views. For one, there is the intricate brooch by L. Eugene Nelson of Albuquerque that uses traditional Indian materials - silver, turquoise and other stones - in a finely engineered piece modeled on (what else?) a computer chip.

"Not that this show doesn't have its quota of bad choices - for example, an ornate blue glass bowl by C. S. Tarpley with an arabesque pattern inspired by Moorish floral motifs silver jewelry by Darrell Jumbo in the form of cutesy animals and an 'Iwo Jima' memorial pot by Diego Romero decorated in a camouflage pattern with a sculpture on its lid drawn from the famous flag-raising photograph. But every show is allowed a few lapses.

"To distance the artists further from stereotypes, the works are presented by theme rather than by medium or tribal affiliation. The idea is to show their creations as independent works of art. But the five themes overlap confusingly. 'Historical Provocation' includes artists who have explored 'the aesthetic and intellectual content of the past,' while 'Form Beyond Function' covers objects rooted in use, but now more attuned to the notion of form. 'Nature and Narrative' combines the Indian tradition of storytelling with that of nature-derived imagery 'The Human Condition' covers those who depict or suggest the human body and 'Material Evidence' stresses the technology of translating materials into forms that engage the mind and the eye. So the presentation is a medley: jewelry, pottery, figurines and so forth appear together in different theme spaces. But for a more relaxed visual experience, the viewer need not be bound by this didactic approach.

"An outstanding contribution is made by the jewelers, whose works are a distance from the heavy, turquoise-studded silver trinkets still peddled to tourists in the Southwest Indian country. Among the outstanding pieces are Veronica Poblano's delicate torque necklaces, suspended from the neck like the enlarged tops of coat hangers and dangling twisted loops paved with shell, turquoise and other stones Mr. Bird-Romero's dazzling bar brooch with a horizontal black stone flanked by a pair of emerald-cut peridots, mounted in silver and inflected by two wavy gold bars beneath and Larry Golsh's 'Morning Star Brooch,' a square translucent carnelian geometrically carved and set in gold. It was inspired by a view through a mist of the luminescent morning star.

"Pottery is another stellar category, although - perhaps because its shapes refer more to tradition - it tends to appear less original than the jewelry. Among the more arresting exhibits are two big earthenware vessels by Jacquie Stevens that evoke the baskets of her Winnebago ancestry. 'Double-Spouted Jar,' a blue free-form shape speckled with pink, has a friendly, slightly erotic presence, while 'Vessel,' a sleek gray bulb shape with slight indentations, is a refined, elegant sister.

"Other knockout pieces are the smallish 'Seed Jar' of polychromed earthenware by Dorothy Torivio of Acoma, N.M. Billowing from a tiny neck to a full body, it is painted in the Acoma palette of black, white and red in a riveting abstract pattern that leads the eye on an Op-ish chase. Not to be overlooked is Mr. Smith's 'Wyandot Vessel,' also of polychromed earthenware, a low, squat rounded pot reminiscent of the baskets made by his Wyandot ancestors, but made current by a lively abstract pattern resembling geometricized leaves.

"Space, alas, restricts mention of other great things here. Among textiles, a dazzler is the 'Grand Canyon Weaving' by Eleanor Yazzie of Pinon, Ariz., an abstract desert landscape in animated colors, made using ancient techniques learned from Ms. Yazzie's grandmother. Another treasure is Ms. Sakiestewa's two 'Migration' tapestries her superb technique derives from ancient Hopi weaving, but her subtly colored geometric-cum-calligraphic motifs are very today.

"In figural sculpture, Roxanne Swentzell of Santa Clara, N.M., deserves kudos for her large earthenware people. Of decided Indian presence, they nevertheless comment - humorously or poignantly - on the concerns of all humanity. More satirical are the sassy earthenware characters by Virgil Ortiz of Santa Fe, N.M., whose amusing grotesqueries derive from a Cochiti tradition of caricature figurines. And the familiar Kachina dolls, present in this show in many incarnations, are brilliantly satirized by Wilmer Kaye of Hopi, Ariz. His sculpture of carved cottonwood shows this Hopi agricultural spirit in black-and-white jester's garb, comically peering into space from the top of a stone column, while supplicants crowd below.

" 'Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation' is the first in a series of three exhibitions planned by the museum to explore the current state of the arts in pre-European American societies. The two exhibitions to follow will survey work done by Indian artists in the Plains and Plateau regions and on the East and West coasts, and including Hawaii. With this show, the series is off to a promising start."

"Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation" is at the American Craft Museum, 40 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 956-3535, through Sept. 20.

Textiles: A Hands-On Folk Art

"Textiles: A Hands-On Folk Art," was the headline for Roberta Smith's July 12 multi-cultural textile tour of New York's Museum of Natural History in The New York Times.

"I'm probably not the only one who sometimes forgets how much of the history on view at the American Museum of Natural History is man-made," Ms. Smith began. "Sustained exposure to the quantities of art, artifact, dioramic simulacra and cultural information found in the vast halls devoted to the different peoples of the world can trigger aesthetic vertigo. Although one could sometimes use a little more label information, the displays are often magnificent to the point of being overwhelming. And nowhere more than in the sprawling category of the weaving arts. I was especially struck by the frequency, beauty and variety of woven fabrics, objects and wearable things: textiles, articles of clothing, baskets and mats.

"Of course, man-made versus natural is to some degree a false dichotomy. Humans, after all, are just another animal species our evolution from the apes is, in fact, spelled out in the museum's Hall of Primates and Hall of Human Biology and Evolution. In addition, our material existence evolved organically from the natural environment that's all there was to work with.

"Human culture begins in learning, through trial and error, ingenuity and luck, to convert such basic substances as stone, wood, plant fiber, animal skin and clay into tools, weapons, containers, shelter, body covering and objects for religious or ceremonial purposes. And beyond raw materials, nature often provided crucial hints about use. For example, the craft that would eventually be weaving may have been jump-started by the example of birds using natural fibers to build nests. Felt, made by subjecting piles of loose fibers to moisture, heat and pressure, was probably first suggested by the permanent matting cave dwellers noticed when they wore their pelts with the fur side against their skin.

"This continual, highly successful working with nature is one of the museum's grand narratives, along with epics like the creation of the universe and the origin of the species - and grasping its scope is a challenge, a privilege and, if you work it right, a joy.

"A good way to sharpen one's knowledge of the holdings and organizational principles of New York's big museums is to follow a single material or fabrication process throughout their galleries. (The first article in this series traced earthenware and stoneware ceramics through the Metropolitan Museum.) The process cuts through a museum's built-in cultural divisions and aesthetic hierarchies, giving one a fuller sense of the global history of a single medium. Call it a mono-medium museum of the mind.

"In the case of the Museum of Natural History, the weaving arts seemed an obvious quarry. The museum has more garments on permanent view than probably any other New York museum, and they are from all over the world. Its extensive displays of textiles provide a crash course in the medium's history and techniques, in some cases aided by the inclusion of actual looms and diagrams and photographs. Those hankering for Asian or European carpets and tapestries will have to go to the Met, but the achievements covered by the museum on Central Park West include one high point after another. Most notable is one of the world's outstanding collections of ancient Peruvian textiles, which rank among the Western Hemisphere's greatest artistic achievements.

"Like ceramics, weaving is both a basic survival skill and an early sign of culture. And also like ceramics, it emerged at different times in different parts of the world, but always on the early side its utilitarian, symbolic and decorative potential has been appreciated and exploited for thousands of years. But otherwise, ceramics and weaving could not be more different. "Ceramics form a coherent, firmly outlined if not rigid medium: an object is made of fired clay, or it is not ceramic. The defining fact of its existence is the almost magical transformation by extreme heat, a fusion largely determined by laws of physics that take place in the fiery depths of a kiln. "In contrast, woven things are built: their parts are joined but not irrevocably fused. They are subject to the more flexible laws of engineering and its abstraction, geometry. Their structure is basically architectural, a matter of support, reinforcement and tension. The warp and weft of a textile remain discernible - even if only by microscope - as well as dissectible. Try unraveling a pot.

"For that reason, woven things form an amorphous, shape-shifting category, fittingly fuzzy around the edges and encompassing an array of materials and scores of techniques and variations on techniques whose details can consume a scholar's lifetime. Basketry is almost always considered a category unto itself beading, especially on animal skin, sometimes is felt is not strictly speaking a textile because it is not woven. But the amorphousness is a symptom of the medium's widespread applicability, and its wavering boundaries are part of the fun of this particular tour, which also takes one through a short history of museum installation design. Just one travel advisory: don't leave the lobby without a floor plan.

"The best place to begin is one of the galleries farthest from the museum's front door, the Hall of South American Peoples. Redesigned in 1989, it is the newest of the seven peoples halls and has the best labeling and technical explanations. But mainly its contrast of raw and cooked - of simple Amazonian fishnets, for example, and refined, exquisitely patterned ancient Peruvian tapestries - illuminates with thrilling clarity the span from rudimentary textile to great art that is the subtext of nearly all the peoples halls.

"Upon reaching this gallery, you'll be greeted by a glaring yellow-feather mask with the small, intently staring bird face that is depicted on so many Peruvian textiles, often with the mask included. A few yards behind it is a small vitrine labeled 'Beginnings of Andean Art.' It contains a selection of textile fragments dating from around 2500-2000 B.C. These were discovered at Huaca Prieta, on the north coast of Peru, in 1946 and 1947, and are the oldest excavated South American textiles. While their decorative motifs are terribly faded, their structural sophistication and refinement are conspicuous. They are older than the ceramic remains in the area, and also predate the Chavin culture, Peru's first major civilization when they surfaced, they redefined the time line of ancient Peru. The man who unearthed them was Junius C. Bird, a revered archaeologist whose 50-year career as curator at the museum is a main reason for the quality of its Andean textiles.

"Most of these fragments are twined, a variant on plain weaving in which there are two weft threads that cross each other in the space between the warp threads. These fabrics are so delicately worked that the technique is difficult to see.

"If you want to go back to basics where the parts are more visible, head through the glass doors to the last vitrines in this long gallery (which has no outlet). There you'll find Amazonian fishnets, hammocks and bags made by different systems of looping, linking or knotting a single strand of fiber - early forms of crocheting and macramé - that were the first textile techniques. Also on view here are several models of Amazonian houses, whose thatched roofs have woven infrastructures.

"But I recommend starting along the sides of a slightly elevated section in the middle of the hall. You'll find a small cluster of vitrines (dimly lighted for conservation purposes) that, foot for foot, form one of the most quality-packed spaces in any New York museum. Here one can study the textiles of the different Peruvian peoples - beginning with those from Paracas Peninsula and Nazca around 400 B.C., to the highland cities of Wari and Tiwanaka, which flourished around A.D. 800 to 1200 to the Inca, the last and largest empire, destroyed by Pizarro in 1532.

"Living in a region where there were both great cold and indigenous wool-bearing animals, the Andeans developed wool harvesting and yarn-making foremost to clothe themselves. They also wove for the dead - that is, for the burial of important personages or sacrifice victims who were mummified by being wrapped in layer upon layer of cotton fabric, wool fabric and finally tunics and mantles whose oversize scale signified their stature. (There is an especially large, heavily fringed Paracas tunic near the glass-door entrance.) Such rituals, along with the fact that burial sites were typically either in dry coastal deserts or on frozen mountains, account for the great number of Andean textiles preserved in near-perfect condition.

"This section is a dreamy mixture of learning and looking. On one side there is the museum's great Paracas mantle, its dark blue ground checkered in red and yellow bird faces, its wide red borders woven with larger birds, probably condors, with outstretched wings. To the other side is a brown tapestry from Nazca whose intersecting zigzag patterns in red, white and black may have been inspired by the weaving process itself. And around a little bend is a Wari tunic in pinks and browns whose striped and gridded pattern suggests stacked rooms, some with staircases. The garment exemplifies an interlocking technique that allowed the weavers to change colors while keeping the shapes' outlines especially crisp.

"But there are dozens of things to look at here: beautiful examples of gauze, another Andean invention- and electrically colored border strips with tiny figures executed in a method that resembles a microscopic version of knitting, one of the few textile techniques that the ancient Peruvians never got around to inventing. Also here are exceptionally clear diagrams and magnified string models that explicate the many techniques (twining included) that they did develop, often to unequaled levels of perfection.

"Some of this tour is more about absence than presence, and the effects of spatial constraints. The museum owns around 1,000 African textiles, but lack of gallery space keeps nearly all of them out of sight. So, on the textile front, the visit to the Hall of African Peoples will be brief but fruitful.

"There are, of course, further adventures in fish netting and basketry. But there are also three enormous dance costumes made from raffia worn in initiation ceremonies in Liberia and Sierra Leone. They are clearly intended to corroborate the fierceness of the dancers' masks. A little beyond is a lone bark-cloth skirt, daintily pleated, and best of all are four egbe, Mangbetu women's fan-size back aprons made of layered palm leaves, from the early 20th century. Just how early would be interesting to know: they are decorated with cutouts of animated silhouettes - people, animals or geometric shapes - and they definitely bring to mind Cubist collage and Matisse's 'Jazz.' A delicate but slightly basketish textile on a raffia cloth loom sheds some light on the gray area between baskets and textiles.

"Backtrack out of the African hall and turn left toward the sign announcing the Hall of the Asian Peoples, but don't go there. Instead go up the stairs to the second floor and turn right, through the Hall of the Primates to the Hall of the Eastern Woodlands Indians and, beyond it, the Hall of the Plains Indians.

"Ancient crafts alternate with European-influenced adaptations in these halls. There are buffalo robes painted with geometric designs or the owners' wartime exploits in colors of red, yellow and blue extracted from clay, and there are also similar motifs painted on a Ghost Dance dress and a Ghost Dance shirt made of cotton carried West by white traders. There are Ojibwa, Menomini and Potawatomi bags made of twined wool with geometric designs that recur more elaborately on animal-hide garments and tobacco pouches decorated with bright glass beads, another trade item. More modest but equally intriguing are the two Seminole garments pieced together from tiny squares and strips of bright cotton in what is a miniaturized form of quilting: a woman's skirt and, even better, a child's dress, patterned with stripes, plain and stepped crosses that might symbolize trees. Don't miss the Cherokee sifting baskets and Micmac birch-bark boxes, especially the one decorated with porcupine quills.

"Next, a corridor leads directly from the Plains Indians to the Hall of South Pacific Peoples, another long, no-outlet gallery, which contains so many different cultures that it is in many ways the world unto itself. Some of the more sculpturally extraordinary objects in these galleries include suits of coconut-fiber armor from the Admiralty Islands and, also of fiber, the museum's great mask of the Hawaiian god Ku. Its extravagant curves and gaping mouth would originally have been softened by a coat of feathers. Today, it has a comic menace, but the white teeth (dogs') are sharp and real. Next to it is a feathered ceremonial cape, also Hawaiian, a grand semicircle of bright orange punctuated by wedges and triangles of yellow that is reminiscent of a Matisse cutout.

"If these objects belong in the raw category (along with Samoan bark-cloth and bulky Maori capes made of woven fiber), the cooked is represented by a range of cotton fabrics whose intricate patterns are sometimes woven and sometimes dyed. The textiles and garments in this gallery are displayed in crowded vitrines that encourage visual comparisons but don't always include much information. One case is devoted to Indonesian batik. Another, a cornucopia of 28 different textiles, is dominated by Indonesian ikat fabric, whose blurry patterns result from resist-dyeing the warp threads once they are on the loom. And a third contains the elaborately beaded and embroidered garments of the Bagobo from the coast of Mindanao, in the Philippines.

"Backtrack through the American Indian displays, past the primates, down the stairs again, and turn left, into the Hall of Asian Peoples. The main attraction here is the garments, which make palpable the diversity and achievements of Asian cultures and confirm the prevalence of sartorial dash in one form or another. The clothing ranges from the reed loincloths from the Senai of Malaysia to the crisp worsted uniform of a Russian Cossack an olive drab felt coat worn by residents of the Siberian gulag two exquisite coats of embroidered salmon skin from the Amur River peoples near the Arctic Circle and a 19th-century suit of armor made of steel slats bound together with sinew from the Chuckee, a tribe in northern Siberia. The slightly labyrinthine layout also contains several flowing garments that, beyond the burka, were traditionally worn by women in Afghanistan a tunic and pants from the Upper Sind in Kashmir so opulently decorated it almost seems like mosaic a theatrical costume from Thailand, heavily embroidered with gold thread a Chinese mandarin's quilted jacket and pants and from Japan, Ainu fishermen's coats and a thatched raincoat.

"Most of the textiles in these galleries were purchased when the hall was redone in 1980 to create the proper cultural setting for the clothing and objects, and are neither rare nor old. But there are a few exceptions, most notably a beautiful Tibetan temple banner in muted colors of gold, rose and blue silk with appliqué and embroidery. It depicts the Tibetan Buddhist diety Samvara embracing his consort, Vajravarahi, with an escort of 12 dakinis, deities who represent female wisdom.

"To enter the Northwest Coast Indian hall on the museum's ground floor, directly downstairs from the Siberian end of the Hall of Asian Peoples, is to step back in time. Although slightly refurbished in time for the museum's centennial celebrations in 1969, it harks back to the cabinet of curiosities. Several tall Northwest Coast totem poles watch over the dark wood cabinets and walls one hopes these guardians will ward off radical change, although another sprucing up probably wouldn't hurt. The whole gallery should be maintained as an increasingly rare archaeological artifact of museum display.

"The baskets here - especially those of the Salish, the Nootka and the Tlingit Indians - are drop-dead great, as engaging and breathtakingly refined as the best Andean textiles upstairs. Their quality fully illuminates the gray area between basketry and textiles and suggests that the distinction is sometimes a matter of degree, determined more by flexibility and use than anything else. There are rigid baskets and mats, soft baskets, softer bags and quite a few articles of clothing, which may have been the decisive factor.

"Wool was not plentiful and was reserved for ceremonial garments, most famously the densely twined Chilkat blankets with their splayed animal motifs delineated in black, white, yellow and pale green there are several examples here. Everyday clothes were often made with plant fibers there are a man's shirt and leggings made of woven moss and sage-bark socks in the Thompson Indian section, and a cedar-bark hat, cape and apron in the Kwakiutl display.

"One of the achievements that seem most glaringly absent from the peoples halls at the Museum of Natural History (along with the dearth of African textiles) are the woven blankets of the Navajo Indians, whose declarative colors and geometries are another high point of non-Western (or perhaps truly Western) culture. The museum has many Navajo blankets of excellent quality, I am told, but no space for a Hall of Southwest Indians. This also means that its holdings in the region's ceramics are out of sight.

"When following the textiles trail through the galleries and trying to get the most from the marvels on view, it is hard to compute that this treasure house can exhibit only 2.8 percent of the man-made materials in its vaults."

The American Museum of Natural History is at Central Park West and 79th Street. Museum admission (suggested donation): $10 $7.50 for students and 60+ 12 and under, $6 under 2, free. Information: www.mnh.org, (212) 769-5100.

African masks are a familiar enough sight at museums. But African shields?

From The New York Times, August 20,, a brief story on a new show on African shields as art:

"African masks are a familiar enough sight at museums. But African shields? The Neuberger Museum of Art at the State University of New York at Purchase aims to make these objects more familiar with a new exhibition, 'African Shields: Art, Power and Identity.' It's a small show, but it covers a lot of ground, with 15 shields from 13 cultures, from modern-day Cameroon to Ethiopia to Rwanda and Congo. The shields come from the collection of Denyse and Marc Ginzberg of Rye, N.Y. Mr. Ginzberg is a founder of the Museum for African Art, which is currently moving to a temporary space in Long Island City, with plans to open a new building at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street by 2006. The show at the Neuberger opens Sunday and runs through March 2, 2003. Information: (914) 251-6100.

Santa Fe Indian Market: a Weekend for Indian Artists to Get Their Business Done

"Weekend for Indian Artists to Get Their Business Done," read the headline of Joshua Brockman's August 22, 2002 Arts in America column on Indian Market in The New York Times.

Datelined Santa Fe, N.M. the article began, "Before daybreak Saturday morning, collectors who had pulled all-nighters in the booths assigned to their favorite artists were sprawled out in lawn chairs or cots, holding their place in line at this year's Indian Market. Some had waited a day and a half.

"The Indian Market takes its name from two intense days of selling Indian art at outdoor booths around this city's plaza, but it has blossomed into a weeklong celebration of Indian culture with museum exhibitions, benefit auctions, gallery openings, music and even a film festival.

Indian Market, which began in 1922, is produced by the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts and attracts nearly 80,000 visitors, who spend millions of dollars. For many Indian artists the income from these two days, whether through sales or commissions placed at the market, sustains them throughout the year.

" 'This is a great launching for any Native American who wants to get discovered and noticed,' said Nancy Youngblood, 46, from the Santa Clara Pueblo, who is famous for her melon-shaped pottery adorned with elegant S-swirl rib designs. 'The toughest competition is at this show.'

"Artists are subjected to a rigorous screening process by the market's organizers, and hundreds of them were kept out this year. With the current vogue for all things turquoise, the tourists and collectors who lined the streets last weekend could shop with confidence that all the materials and methods used were authentic. In addition to the usual browsers, there was a large contingent of museum directors and curators from the United States and abroad, many of whom are re-examining how they acquire and display Indian art. The concentration of more than a thousand Indian artists here, and the increasing number of gallery openings, has made Indian Market into an annual pilgrimage for a roster of museums.

" 'Museums that are not looking at this as a source of collecting are really missing the boat,' said Ellen Napiura Taubman, a guest curator at the American Craft Museum in Manhattan for its show 'Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation,' which examines contemporary Indian art from the Southwest. 'You can no longer put Indian art off to the side. I think it has just gotten too good.' Ms. Taubman, who started the American Indian department at Sotheby's in the 1970's, was at Indian Market with a contingent from the American Craft Museum.

" 'There isn't really an art show for contemporary artists anywhere else where artists represent themselves with this kind of high quality,' said Holly Hotchner, director of the craft museum.

"Major institutions like the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and the British Museum, as well as regional ones like the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, the Heard Museum, the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, and the Museum of New Mexico's Museum of Indian Arts and Culture all had representatives wandering the streets to meet with artists and survey new works.

"The Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Mass., however, was on a buying mission. Early Saturday morning, Dan Monroe, executive director, and John Grimes, curator of Native American art, purchased a bracelet by Jesse Monongye titled 'Spiritual Hand.' Mr. Monongye, a Navajo, is a jeweler known for his inlay work he has been showing at Indian Market for 30 years.

"The bracelet features a gold hand that ends as an arrowhead, and has an array of inlaid coral and turquoise that includes a Navajo sun face that rotates, revealing an Australian opal on the reverse side, symbolizing a full moon. Mr. Monongye's work is in the collections of several museums, including the Heard and the Cooper-Hewitt.

" 'We're looking for something that represents contemporary, more edgy, Native American jewelry,' Mr. Grimes said. It will join a collection of historic Indian art that dates back to the founding of the Peabody Essex Museum in 1799. Winning the best of market prize here has inaugurated many artists' careers. Some past winners no longer show at the market, opting instead to display their work at galleries.

"But Lonnie Vigil, 53, who won the top prize last year for a large water jar fashioned from micaceous clay that had been fired twice in a smothering process to create an iridescent gun-metal color, still shows up. He greets visitors at his booth along with many members of his family, including his mother, and his brother Larry, who assists him with production.

" 'I'm the person who creates it, but it's Nambe Pueblo pottery,' Mr. Vigil said.''It belongs to my ancestors, my ancestry, to my family and to our community. Unlike Western art, we don't claim the work as our own.'

"While pottery and jewelry are the most prevalent art forms, textiles, beadwork, painting, sculpture and glass are also on display. A number of artists at Indian Market studied these crafts at the Institute of American Indian Arts here, including Tony Jojola, 44, who worked with glass at the school before going on to team up with Dale Chihuly.

"Mr. Jojola's work uses traditional Pueblo designs as a point of departure. Working with glass threads, he draws lightning, rain, clouds, spirit faces or water designs on glass forms that resemble pottery, ceremonial bowls, baskets or other vessels.

"One of the highlights of Indian Market is seeing the large-scale collaborative work created each year for a benefit auction. This year the theme of the Indian Market live auction was 'The Triumph of Indian Art,' because 12 Indian artists donated their time and art to create a sleek, and fully functional, Indian Art Car from a 1974 Triumph TR6.

"Sam and Ethel Ballen, who own La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe, donated the car to benefit Indian arts groups. The souped-up model sold for $90,000. Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler, president of the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation, an organization that assists in the return of ceremonial materials, purchased the car.

"Dan Namingha, 52, a painter and sculptor, who is both Tewa and Hopi, designed the custom paint job by blending Indian and American imagery, including numerous eagles painted on the sides and hood of the car. Other artists created a beaded steering-wheel cover and custom upholstery among other accessories.

" 'America has become a universal country, a melting pot of several cultures, and we're under the blanket of that symbol of the eagle,' Mr. Namingha said. In the Hopi culture, eagles are a symbol of healing and are used in religious ceremonies.

"The black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the sides of the car is also used on Hopi pottery to symbolize people, cloud formations or rain. The pattern also recalls the checkerboard flag used in automobile races, Mr. Namingha said. He also painted the four Hopi cardinal directions - red for south, blue for west, white for east, yellow for north - on the trunk of the car surrounding a spiral representing human migration."

Confirming the Popularity of Turquoise

Confirming the popularity of turquoise, on August 25, Bill Cunningham devoted his On The Street column in the Sunday New York Times to 18 photographs of women and one man wearing the blue stone. "Just Big Enough for Flaunting," read the headline.

"Turquoise stones the size of birds' eggs," the short article began, "branches of coral and cascades of pearl seashells are some of the fantasy jewelry being worn this summer. After a decade of minimalism that stripped fashion of all accessories, embellishment is back. Most popular are American Indian turquoise and silver pieces, along with fringe belts, cascading bib-style evening necklaces and turquoise-color stones and coral beads decorating sandals."

Native New Yorkers of an Original Kind: The City wit the Largest American Indian Population is New York

"Native New Yorkers of an Original Kind," read the headline for Jason Begay's story in The New York Times on August 29.

"The city with the largest American Indian population," the story began, "according to the 2000 Census, is not Phoenix. Not Los Angeles. It is New York City. The news is a surprise even to some Indians living in the city.'You're kidding, right?' said Rosemary Richmond, the director of the American Indian Community House in Manhattan.

"The census counted 41,289 American Indians and Alaska natives living in the city in 2000. And although the Census Bureau's form allowed people to claim more than one race, helping increase the numbers from previous years, when the census counted those people who claimed only some American Indian or Alaska native heritage, New York City was still No. 1, with 87,241. (Los Angeles and Phoenix ranked second and third in both population categories.)

"One reason people do not realize how many Indians are in the city is that they are spread throughout the boroughs. 'There's no concentration of a community, because there's such a diversity of tribes,' said Michael A. Taylor, who works with the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, and was the head male dancer in the annual Thunderbird Powwow in Queens last month.''And the diversity of percentage of blood, it's across the board.'

"There are more than 500 American Indian tribes in the country, and many are represented in New York City. Most tribes, Mr. Taylor said, have their own languages and religions.

"The American Indian Community House in Lower Manhattan provides services to about 6,000 people a year, including a free lunch program, food and clothing banks, medical referrals and job and computer training. Some board members, however, say that the center, which was formed in 1969, is in need of expansion, both of its offices at 708 Broadway and of its services.

" 'One of our problems is that we are defined by our social problems,' said Leota Lone Dog, an artist and board member, of the center's focus on helping the poor and the unemployed. 'The people who are coming into the city don't have the same types of problems that this organization was built on.'

"One of the biggest problems now, says Louis Mofsie, the chairman of the center's board, is more intermarriage. 'As time goes on, we're going to have more and more Indian people in urban areas with less and less Indian blood,' said Mr. Mofsie, who is Winnebago and Hopi and has spent all of his 65 years in and around New York City.

"So even though the community house is the largest meeting place for American Indians in the city, with a solid flow of regulars who attend the monthly powwows and lunches for the elderly and youth council meetings, Mr. Mofsie said that he would like to see the center offer more social gatherings and events. Perhaps, he reasons, that would make it easier for the city's American Indians to meet one another. Some have found that hard, and harder still to meet someone from the same tribe.

" 'I went through it myself I did look for a Seneca husband,' said Stephanie Betancourt, 48. 'But you can't say who you're going to care about.' Mrs. Betancourt's husband is Puerto Rican. Their son Paul Betancourt married outside the tribe as well. Because tribal lineage is passed through the mother, his children will not be considered Senecas by the tribe, the Seneca Nation of Indians.

"Mr. Betancourt, 25, was born on a reservation in western New York but has spent most of his life in the city, growing up in the Bronx and going to school in Harlem. He shares the passion of his tribe's history and culture that his mother tried to instill in all three of her children. He and his mother both now work at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, in Lower Manhattan

"Mrs. Betancourt tried to balance the Seneca and Puerto Rican cultures of her three children. But the tribal policy means that it will be hard to remain an Indian family. 'How much blood do you have to have to be an Indian?' Mrs. Betancourt asked.

"Alyse Eggleston, a spokeswoman from the clerk's office at the Seneca Nation of Indians in western New York, said this tribally mandated rule was an extension of tribal history."'It's always been that women traditionally have more power,' she said.

"This is little consolation to Mrs. Betancourt. 'I think we live in times where we have to think about changing things,' she said. 'I don't think we're ever going to have a homogeneous race again.'

"Mr. Mofsie and Ms. Richmond do recall when there was an identifiable American Indian community in the city. Both talk fondly of the time in the 1960's, when Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, around Nevins Street was full of Mohawks who worked in steel. They also talk about a church on Pacific Street, where the pastor learned to speak Mohawk.

" 'We were there all the time,' Mr. Mofsie said. The Rev. David Munroe Cory, the pastor, even allowed Mr. Mofsie's group of friends, who called themselves the Little Eagles, to use the church to sing and dance. That group eventually became the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers.

"But even without a similar neighborhood now, Mr. Mofsie sees Indians working to hold on to their heritage, despite documentation disputes in the tribes. 'I see the enthusiasm the people have in keeping the traditions alive,' he said. 'Being an Indian is becoming more a cultural than a blood issue.'

"There are already some groups in the city that have accepted this and are dedicated to continuing the cultures of their tribe, regardless of official tribal recognition. Walter Red Eagle is a founder of the Cherokee Language and Cultural Circle. He is 58, a retired truck driver and walks with a cane wrapped in buckskin. His great-grandfather, he said, was Cherokee. He is not enrolled in the tribe, and has no plans to be. 'Why would I want to?' he asked. 'They don't ask any other ethnic group to enroll or prove their heritage.'

"Mr. Red Eagle learned to speak some Cherokee growing up in Radford, W. Va. He said he learned to speak fluently from a tribal elder he met in New Jersey in the early 1990's. Since 1997, he has met weekly with the circle, although many of the members are not enrolled in the tribe.

"Mr. Red Eagle's Cherokee heritage is a small portion of his ethnic background, but it is the part he feels bonded to. 'It doesn't matter what mix of culture you have,' he said. 'What you were meant to be in life comes out.' "

Tired of turquoise?

Oh no! So soon? On September'1, the New York Times asks in the Sunday Styles section, "Tired of turquoise?" Horn, says The Times, is the jewelry theme for fall.

Judge Lets Scientists Study Kennewick Man Skeleton for Clues About Early Americans

An important decision was reported in The New York Times on September 1. The headline: "Judge Lets Scientists Study Kennewick Man Skeleton for Clues About Early Americans."

The A.P. story datelined Portland, Oregon, began: "A federal magistrate judge has ordered the government to let scientists study the bones of Kennewick Man, an ancient skeleton discovered on the banks of the Columbia River. Scientists say the bones could offer clues about the earliest Americans.

"The ruling by the judge, John Jelderks, on Friday rejected a decision by Bruce Babbitt, the interior secretary then, to give the remains to Indian tribes for reburial.

"Magistrate Jelderks criticized the way the Interior Department and the Army Corps of Engineers had handled the case. The government had"'failed to consider all the relevant factors, had acted before it had all of the evidence, had failed to fully consider legal questions, had assumed facts that proved to be erroneous, had failed to articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action, had followed a 'flawed' procedure, and had prematurely decided the issue,' Magistrate Jelderks wrote.

"After reviewing 20,000 pages of documents filed in the case in six years, Magistrate Jelderks wrote, 'nothing I have found in a careful examination of the administrative record supported the government. Allowing study is fully consistent with applicable statutes,' he wrote.

"Dana Perino, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said government lawyers would review the ruling before commenting.

"The scientists said they were happy with the ruling but emphasized it was a legal battle against the government interpretation of the law, not tribal tradition. 'I'm sure Native Americans see it differently, but this suit was against the government, not the Indian tribes,' said one, Richard L. Jantz, an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

"Alan Schneider, a Portland lawyer who represented the scientists, said Magistrate Jelderks sided with the scientists 'on nearly all major issues.'

"The ruling should set a national precedent for archaeological discoveries, and the scientists will take the case 'all the way to the Supreme Court' if the government appeals, Mr. Schneider said.

"Allowing scientific study of the skeleton will benefit everyone, including Indians, by offering clues to early migration and culture, said Robson Bonnichsen, former director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

"Shortly after the skeleton was found in July 1996 near Kennewick, Wash., Dr. Bonnichsen, Dr. Jantz and six other scientists went to federal court to prevent the Corps of Engineers from giving the bones to the tribes. The scientists said that a nearly intact ancient skeleton was extremely rare and that initial analysis indicated the bones differed from those of modern Indians.

"But Mr. Babbitt backed the Corps of Engineers, which manages Columbia River navigation, saying the remains were 'culturally affiliated' with Northwest tribes. Mr. Babbitt acted under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, a law intended to prevent the theft and sale of Indian artifacts, to protect tribal burial sites and to restore the remains of ancestors to the tribes. The law requires federal agencies or museums to return remains and relics to tribes that can 'show cultural affiliation' based on 'geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, folkloric, oral traditional, historical, or other relevant information or expert opinion.'

"The scientists, however, argued that no group can establish a direct link that extends back 9,000 years. 'Babbitt said oral tradition trumped everything else,' Dr. Jantz said."

Spring_2002

Native Americans have their troubles with the eagle protection laws too: Man on Trial for Smuggling Eagles

Native Americans have their troubles with the eagle protection laws too. "Man on Trial for Smuggling Eagles" read the headline for an Associated Press story in The New York Times on October 23, 2001.

Datelined Seattle, the story began, "To his tribe, Terry Antoine is a medicine man with the power to purify eagle feathers for sacred ceremonies. To the government, he's a black-market peddler of eagle carcasses, allegedly selling them in violation of laws aimed at protecting threatened species.

"Antoine was scheduled to go on trial Tuesday for violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act in a case that pits the religious rights of American Indians against the government's efforts to protect bald eagles. Prosecutors say he smuggled eagle carcasses from Canada, then sold or bartered them for cash, blankets, beadwork, jewelry and firearms. Antoine, a member of the Cowichan band of the Salish tribe in British Columbia, faces up to nine years in prison and $45,000 in fines if convicted. His lawyer, Michael Filipovic of Seattle, has not said how Antoine got the eagle carcasses, but said they all apparently came from Canada and that his client gave them to other tribes for use in religious ceremonies.

"Bald eagles, a national symbol, are sacred to Indians. Their feathers are used by tribes throughout North America to make masks, whistles and medicine bundles used in coming-of-age ceremonies, name-giving rituals and funeral rites.

".only religious practitioners in federally recognized tribes can legally obtain eagles in the United States, and the wait to get them can be up to three years. Canada, which also has laws protecting eagles, has similar restrictions. More than 5,000 permit requests are pending at the National Eagle Repository outside Denver, which receives about 1,000 eagles a year from federal officers or citizens who find them dead in the wild."

"According to court records, the carcasses of 32 bald eagles and one golden eagle were found in a storage locker Antoine had rented in Fife, Wash., in early 1999, soon after Canadian authorities seized parts from at least 124 eagles in Antoine's home in British Columbia. Wildlife officers gasp at those numbers, but American Indian advocates question why the government prosecutes people like Antoine. 'The system does not work well,' said James Botsford, an attorney who represents the Native American Church of North America. 'It does not accommodate Native Americans' religion interests in a friendly or supportive manner.' "

Marvin Harris, 74, Is Dead Professor Was Iconoclast of Anthropologists

Douglas Martin's October 28, 2001 obituary in The New York Times bore the headline "Marvin Harris, 74, Is Dead Professor Was Iconoclast of Anthropologists"

"Marvin Harris," Martin wrote, "an anthropologist who spent his career adding fuel to the fires of academic controversy, as when he theorized that the cannibalism of the Aztecs was motivated by protein deprivation, died on Thursday in Gainesville, Fla., where he lived. He was 74. His daughter, Susan, said the cause was complications after hip surgery.

"Dr. Harris, called 'one of the most controversial anthropologists alive' by Smithsonian magazine in 1986, believed that human social life was shaped in response to the practical problems of human existence. He argued essentially that cultural differences did not matter much, a novel approach in a discipline dedicated to studying cultural differences.

"The Washington Post described him in 1983 as 'a storm center in his field.' And the Smithsonian article said he pitted himself 'against the mainstream of anthropological thought.' He even took on anthropology's godmother, Margaret Mead, though he was quick to point out that in this he was hardly alone. 'There's never been anything other than a good deal of disquiet about her methods,' he told The New York Times in 1983.

Dr. Harris, who called his approach 'cultural materialism,' was an anthropology professor at Columbia University from 1953 until 1980, including three years as department chairman. From 1980 until 2000, he held a graduate research professorship at the University of Florida.

"But his provocative ideas, and equally provocative presentation, gave him a sphere of influence greatly exceeding that of an ordinary academic. Many of his 17 books were aimed at general audiences. [His books included] Cannibals and Kings" (Random House, 1977) and Culture, People and Nature, which became a widely used anthropology textbook.

What to give to the Navajo blanket collector who has everything?

What to give to the Navajo blanket collector who has everything? The answer is in the November 2001 issue of Saveur magazine.

The perfect gift? What Saveur describes as an "extremely crunchy pink cookie known as biscuit rose" made in France by Biscuits Fossier. Why? Because the pink cookies, the story says, "derive their colors from ground-up edible bodies of tiny scarlet creatures called cochineal insects, originally added to batter to hide vanilla bean flecks. (An ancient pigment, cochineal also tints charcuterie.)" The cookies, which have been baked in Reims since 1691, "are said to have been enjoyed by visiting kings-to-be, who soaked them in red wine while awaiting coronation." Twenty-five French kings were crowned at the Reims cathedral. Call (800) 209-6141 to order the cookies.

Ambiguous and ironic laws? Last minute Interior change on mine affects Zuni tribe

Ambiguous and ironic laws? We're shocked, shocked! "Last minute Interior change on mine affects Zuni tribe," read the headline of this November 5 story from Indian Country Today, datelined Flagstaff, Arizona, by James May.

"The Zuni tribe," the story began, "or the Ashiwa as they call themselves, withstood the test of time and are one of the few tribes to live as ancient ancestors did in the adobe pueblo in the New Mexico desert that bears their name.

"On Oct. 24, the Department of the Interior decided not to sign a mining permit to the Salt River Project (SRP), a large Arizona utility with plans to mine 80 million tons of coal on 18,000 acres in the vicinity of the Zuni Reservation.

"Published reports state fierce opposition from the Zuni tribe and the local environmental community contributed to [the] change of heart. Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Neal McCaleb reportedly attended an Oct. 14 meeting between the BIA and the Bureau of Land Management.

"The BLM supported the mine permit while the BIA previously stated it would intervene on behalf of Zuni. Details are sketchy on what actually transpired in the meeting, though many sources say McCaleb advocated the Zuni's position.

"The proposed Fence Lake Mine, on a combination of public lands in New Mexico, was part of a power scheme designed to provide fuel for power generators in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The permit application had been on the back burner for several years and local environmentalists charge that the Bush administration was trying to take advantage of the current power crisis and Sept. 11 events to further its own agenda.

"The Zuni expressed fears the proposed mine would impact several of its sacred sites, including some ancient burial areas and impact the environment and fragile ecosystem of the Zuni Salt Lake which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property. .Federal law dictates that Interior must consult tribes in "good faith" when a cultural area, particularly a Traditional Cultural Property is going to be affected.

"Zuni Councilman Dan Simplicio said part of the problem is that the federal law is ambiguous. He said no one is quite sure what its limits law are, adding the notion of 'good faith negotiations' is open-ended and vague enough to be taken advantage of by an administration more friendly to environmentally extractive business interests than to American Indian tribes."

".In addition to affecting the environment of the lake, Simplicio said the remains of approximately 500 individuals are located directly in the mining zone. He said he finds the idea of digging up the remains and going through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) somewhat ironic. 'It's really strange. Here you have NAGPRA, who is supposed to be putting itself out of business by getting all the remains back to the tribes and here we might have a federal mandate to dig up more bones. We're going to have to go through miles of red tape to get something back that's where it's supposed to be now...' "

No Room for Riches of the Indian Past

"No Room for Riches of the Indian Past" reads the headline of Catherine C. Robbin's story in The New York Times on November 24, 2001.

Datelined Albuquerque, the story began, "Few motorists speeding along the newly widened U.S. Highway 89 to the canyons and parklands north of Flagstaff, Ariz., know of the archaeological treasure that once lay beneath the road's smooth surface. In just a 17-mile stretch, archaeologists who preceded the road crew's bulldozers found more than 100,000 artifacts, the remains of Native American agricultural and trading cultures that sprouted in the fifth century A.D. and lasted for more than 800 years. Those pieces of carved rock and arrowheads, ceramics and animal bones are headed for the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, the official repository for Highway 89's archaeological bounty. But once those finds are deposited, the museum will be forced to close its doors to new artifacts from public projects. There is just no more room.

" 'Until we deal with the space problem, we won't take any more,' said Arthur Wolf, the museum's president and chief executive officer. The Museum of Northern Arizona is not alone. The combination of preservation legislation and explosive growth in the Southwest over the last decade has created an archaeological boom that has completely overwhelmed the region's museums and anthropological centers, archaeologists, museum executives and government officials say. Their institutions cannot handle all the artifacts found and excavated during publicly financed projects, which are known in the trade as cultural resource materials, or C.R.M.'s. The logjam is so bad that some museums like Northern Arizona are closing their doors to the resource materials, and others are limiting what they will accept, while a third group has increased their fees for cataloguing, analyzing and storing them by as much as 10-fold.

"Some museum officials and researchers are worried that the overload is already leading to improper storage that could permanently damage archaeological holdings. The National Park Service removed one of its collections from the University of Denver's anthropology museum this summer because of substandard conditions, said Christina Kreps, the museum's director. And Mr. Wolf of Northern Arizona, who is one of eight accreditation commissioners for the American Association of Museums, which sets standards for museum operations, admitted that his own museum was below par: 'My own institution is not there.'

"Without relief, the backlog could prevent archaeologists from obtaining excavation permits and could even temporarily stop work on public projects. Most officials agree, however, that something - though they don't know precisely what - will be done to prevent such extreme measures. 'That could happen theoretically,' said Kevin Black, the assistant archaeologist for Colorado's Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, 'but when push comes to shove, we'll do something and won't have to take the drastic step of not issuing permits.'

"The growing concern reached a peak in January, when the University of Colorado's museum in Boulder and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science stopped accepting most cultural resource materials. 'The crisis is now,' said Linda Cordell, the University of Colorado Museum's director. Mr. Wolf said, 'We're just coming to see it as an industry-wide problem.'

"The National Park Service, which maintains several regional repositories for cultural resource materials, earlier this year began a comprehensive review of such institutions in eight Western states including Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, when officials began to realize they would soon run out of room, said Virginia Salazar, the Park Service's regional curator for the Intermountain Region. A similar review began in 1999 in the Southeast region, where museums are also experiencing space problems. "Preservation legislation for America's archaeological wealth is not new. Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906, after looters and European explorers made off with boxcars full of finds from Mesa Verde, a collection of cliff dwellings and other ancestral Native American sites discovered in southwestern Colorado in 1888. The act made Mesa Verde the first national park for archaeological preservation. Since the 1960's, however, legislation like the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 and the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act of 1990 has strengthened protection of the archaeological patrimony.

"In addition, most states and some localities, including Albuquerque in New Mexico and Phoenix and Scottsdale in Arizona have passed preservation legislation tribes like the Navajo and Hopi have established their own cultural preservation programs."

Artifacts. Ribbon-Cutting: The new $30 million Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture opens Jan. 2 in Spokane, Wash., becoming one of the nation's largest repositories of Native American artifacts

From The Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal section, December 28, 2001, in the Art & Money column by Brooks Barnes:

"Artifacts. Ribbon-Cutting: The new $30 million Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture opens Jan. 2 in Spokane, Wash., becoming one of the nation's largest repositories of Native American artifacts."

Sharing a Passion for Africa's Wonders: The more you learn, the more there is to learn

Holland Cotter's New York Times January 4, 2002 review of "Sharing a Passion for Africa's Wonders, began "The more you learn, the more there is to learn. And if there's one big message coming from the intellectually ambitious field of African art history these days, it's that learning about the art of Africa has just begun."

"The American collector Lawrence Gussman," Cotter's story continued, "started learning on his first trip to Africa in 1956. During his stay he visited the hospital run by Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) in the Central African nation of Gabon. Deeply moved by the medical work being done there, he returned as a volunteer every summer for the next 30 years.

"After immersing himself in Western museum collections, in 1965 he began buying African art from dealers and auction houses in the United States and Europe. The hundreds of objects he acquired, from textbook classics to hard-to-identify rarities, spanned much of continent but focused on the Central African countries he knew best from personal experience: Gabon, Angola and Congo (formerly Zaire). In 1999 he divided his collection as a gift among three institutions: the Neuberger Museum at Purchase College of the State University of New York the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. This year choice pieces from all three have been assembled for 'A Personal Journey: Central African Art From the Lawrence Gussman Collection,' an exhibition organized by Christa Clarke, the curator of African art at the Neuberger, where it now appears.

"The 75 objects selected adhere to Mr. Gussman's core regional interest and are sorted into thematic categories by type and use: reliquary guardian figures, masks, objects associated with status and spiritual power. But even with this easy-to- grasp ordering the impression is one of irrepressible, boundary-crossing diversity and invention, of visual motifs borrowed, exchanged, adapted, transformed.

"This dynamic isn't at all surprising, given that the show encompasses nearly three dozen distinctive Central African cultures, many of which are related and none of which have been static. Each has produced artists of varied intentions and skills answering to different demands. In each culture, however insular, outside forces - colonial politics, trade, invasion, environmental change - have had their effect. No wonder the show is so rich in apparent incongruities: objects within a single area will show marked differences of style and form, while pieces geographically far-flung have similarities. For the historian this means that old ethnological demarcations vanish or shift and 'new' cultures appear.

"But what's really happening is life just doing its complicated, organic thing. The interaction of art and life is what makes the study of African art so exciting. And a collection like Mr. Gussman's, shaped by one person's direct experience with particular cultures, contributes to the excitement.

"All of this comes through in the show, in which the familiar and unfamiliar are in balance. This is immediately evident in the section devoted to reliquary guardian figures, created to surmount the earthly remains of village ancestors. Fang figures from Gabon, with long torsos, muscular legs and dark-stained skin, are old favorites of Western collectors, and Mr. Gussman picked up some fine examples.

"He also bought offbeat but related things. A guardian figure from the Mbete people also has an attenuated torso and bulgy Fang-style legs. But rather than standing watch over ancestral relics, it was designed to contain them: the figure's belly has been hollowed out and fitted with a little hinged door for the purpose. The variety of mask styles is more dramatic. There are superb examples of the so-called white-faced masks of southern Gabon, naturalistically rendered in ways that appeal to Western ideals of female beauty. From these, however, one moves to a near-abstract, chevron-shaped mask with barely recognizable facial features. Its place of origin is uncertain next to nothing is known about its function or meaning.

"Equally mysterious is a rare example of a mask covered with a sheet of beaten copper. Expressive in appearance, it is not completely carved out from behind and may never have been worn as a mask at all. Finally, even often-encountered forms can be puzzling. A striking helmetlike mask with bulging eyes and a striated surface is a type associated with both the Luba and Songye peoples, though its meaning depends on the maker. The Songye use such masks to depict evil spirits for the Luba they represent benevolent beings.

"In short, the exhibition, like the creative spirit that animates African art, has many voices - joyous and grave, raucous and serene - sounding at once, and they all come through in the enchanting selection of musical instruments Mr. Gussman put together. A carved wood Yaka whistle in the form of a squat man with a Nixonian ski-jump nose was meant to scare away malevolent forces. A wooden Kongo bell has a handle in the form of a little male figure who sits, arms on knees and head raised as if alert to a distant sound, frightening or alluring. An amazing Fang harp, one of few known examples of its kind, was designed to produce music so ethereal it would link the living with the dead.

"This fantastic piece is included in the portion of the Gussman material given to the Neuberger. The museum received 145 objects, by far the largest share of the total gift, though one can't help but wish it had the entire holdings. There is intrinsic value in keeping any individual collection intact, as evidence of personal and period taste. And the presence of all the Gussman work at Purchase might have more securely positioned the museum as a new center for the study of African art, one that would attract further gifts and academic resources. Such centers are badly needed.

"But as it is, the Neuberger's involvement with Africa is going strong. A solid chunk of the museum's permanent exhibition space is devoted to African art, and under Ms. Clarke's supervision the number of objects on view has been doubled. (Gussman objects will be rotated in after the show completes its tour.) Visiting exhibitions are on the books, with a show of Malian textiles arriving in February.

"By any standard that's a lot. And it's why for any student of African art - meaning anyone who cares and wants to know more about its audacious and centering riches - the Neuberger is now a required stop on the cultural map."

"A Personal Journey: Central African Art From the Lawrence Gussman Collection" remains at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, N.Y., (914)251-6100, through Jan. 13. The exhibition travels to the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Okla. (Feb. 10-April 7), the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington (June 9-Aug. 14), and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Dec. 3, 2002-April 23, 2003).

No Indian ceramics at the Met!

Steve Elmore sent ATADA a copy of a letter he wrote to The New York Times in response to a major article on Ceramics at the Met. "Since I doubt the Times will publish it," Elmore wrote [they didn't], "I thought at least ATADA members might like to see it and be aware of the situation, no Indian ceramics at the Met!"

Dear Sirs:

In Roberta Smith's fine article on Ceramics at the Met in your January 4th paper, she notes that 'the small display of American Indian objects includes no ceramics.' What an amazing display of ignorance and prejudice on the part of the world's greatest museum! American Indian pottery has been around in an unending continuum for well over 1,500 years and has produced undeniable world masterpieces of ceramic artistry, and yet the Met displays not a single piece! Not a single piece of Mimbres figural bowls with their amazing designs, not a single piece of the thousands of wonderfully molded and painted pieces by the prehistoric Anasazi, and not a single piece by the master Hopi pottery Nampeyo, much less Maria Martinez.

The Met celebrates the ceramics of the world while overlooking completely the major accomplishments of the native American ceramic artists whose history discovered and evolved ceramics into a major art form. This gap needs to be filled.

Undiscovered Curtis prints? Images That Are Glorious and Gloriously Unreal

Undiscovered Curtis prints? "Images That Are Glorious and Gloriously Unreal" read the headline of Margarett Loke's January 6 story in The New York Times datelined Salem, Massachusetts.

The story began: "The basement of the old Peabody Museum here is crammed with the kind of treasures you would expect from an institution with roots going back to the 18th century and with close ties to the China trade. A cannon here. A large gilt eagle there. Vintage clocks and ships' models. Ships' figureheads, including one photographed by Walker Evans in the 1930's. A cluster of life-size, 19th-century plaster figures of people from India. And so on.

"For some decades, three print drawers toward the back of the basement held a treasure no one at the museum knew much about. Then in 1976, Peter Fetchko, the museum's director, showed Clark Worswick, a collector of 19th-century and early-20th-century photographs, the contents of those drawers. What Mr. Worswick saw floored him. 'My God,' he recalled thinking, 'I simply do not believe pictures like this exist - or ever existed.'

"The drawers held 109 luminous and majestic exhibition prints of American Indians by Edward S. Curtis - the largest collection of its kind to have surfaced. Most of the images were toned platinum prints in pristine condition. Currently, 71 of what Mr. Worswick considers 'some of the most glorious prints ever made in the history of the photographic medium' are in 'The Master Prints of Edward S. Curtis: Portraits of Native America,' a major exhibition at what is now the Peabody Essex Museum through March 17. Mr. Worswick, who organized the show, became the museum's first curator of photography in January 2000. Platinum exhibition prints of Curtis's work are very rare, Mr. Warwick said. 'I don't think there are more than 200 that survive.' "

Seeking Polynesia's Beginnings in an Archipelago of Shards

"Seeking Polynesia's Beginnings in an Archipelago of Shards," read the headline of John Noble Wilford's January 8 story in the Science section of The New York Times.

The story begins: "The archaeologist David V. Burley looked out on Fanga 'Uta Lagoon and tried to think like ancient seafarers. Here, at the head of the lagoon, is where the first of their outrigger canoes must have pulled in, concluding heroic voyages of hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand miles from the west. So here he decided to dig on the South Pacific island of Tongatapu in the kingdom of Tonga.

"Although the site had been excavated before, Dr. Burley, of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, made a new and revealing discovery concerning a fiercely debated issue in archaeology: the origin and migration routes of the Polynesians. What Dr. Burley found were shards of the distinctively decorated pottery of the Lapita peoples, cultural ancestors to modern Polynesians. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal among the shards showed that adventurous seafarers had reached the Tonga islands between 850 B.C. and 900 B.C., making this the earliest known settlement in Polynesia.

"Tongatapu, Dr. Burley concluded, 'probably served as the initial staging point for population expansion' to other islands of Tonga and into Samoa. The place seemed to be what anthropologists and geneticists call a founding colony. These people, he said, must have 'formed the gene pool for all the rest of Polynesia.' From this new frontier, scholars think, the ancient navigators perfected the double-hull outrigger sailing canoe and set out on their final expansion, venturing over even more immense stretches of open sea. Each of their bigger canoes probably carried tens of people with their pigs and cargo.

"The seafarers made it all the way east to Tahiti and northeast to Hawaii. Hawaii is separated from Samoa and Tonga by more than 2,500 miles, and from Tahiti by 2,700 miles. Then they ranged south to New Zealand and even farther east to Easter Island. The whole of Polynesia, extending over almost one-fourth of the Pacific, thus became the last large area of the world to be settled by people.

"Of particular interest, the pottery by the lagoon, which was excavated in 1999, held clues to where the seafarers who reached Tongatapu had originated. In an analysis of bits of the shards, Dr. William R. Dickinson, a University of Arizona geologist, found sandy minerals exotic to Tonga. Some of the pots had been brought there from elsewhere. Further study revealed that the artifacts were composed of minerals found only on the Santa Cruz Islands in Melanesia, some 1,200 miles to the west and closer to New Guinea and Australia.

"In a report recently in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Burley and Dr. Dickinson called the shards the first physical evidence that linked the voyages of the Lapita people between the western and eastern regions of the wide Pacific. This further established their capability for 'geographically extensive interisland voyaging from or through island groups well to the west of Tonga during the earliest human presence in Polynesia.'

"The researchers also wrote that the 'ties back to the Santa Cruz Islands may imply that Tonga was initially settled by voyagers traveling directly from central Melanesia, rather than through intermediate settlements in Fiji, as has commonly been assumed.'

"Other scholars of Pacific prehistory said, however, that the new research left unresolved many of the fundamental questions of Polynesian origins. Who were the people that produced the Lapita pottery as well as distinctive stone tools, beads, rings and shell ornaments? Were they an ethnically distinct society of newcomers, or one with diverse groups sharing a handicraft style? What was the relationship of the Lapita culture to descendants of the first settlers of the Pacific, beginning some 45,000 years ago, who occupied Australia, New Guinea and nearby islands?

"Although hypotheses abound, no consensus answers have emerged. 'We really don't have a good common-sense picture or story of what the migrations were really like,' said Dr. John Edward Terrell, an anthropologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

"The first of the ornate pots with geometric designs were excavated in 1952 and called Lapita after the discovery site in the Melanesian island of New Caledonia. Subsequent exploration has uncovered the earliest known Lapita artifacts, some 3,500 years old, in the Bismarck Archipelago, northeast of New Guinea. The trail of shards leads from there east to Polynesia. But did the art of making Lapita pottery originate with the indigenous Melanesian population there, or was it introduced by new arrivals?

This so-called 'Polynesian problem' may be more than academic. Newly independent nations in the Pacific, anthropologists noted, are expected to look to history and archaeology in creating distinctive postcolonial cultures. 'We must be aware of the political content and implications of our findings,' said Dr. Matthew Spriggs, an anthropologist at Australian National University in Canberra. 'What has already been written and what is said in the future will be read by audiences we have only recently acknowledged.'

"Early European explorers seem to have been the first to speculate about the identity of the Pacific islanders. In the 18th century, Capt. James Cook was struck by the resemblance of the customs and appearance among the light-skinned Polynesians on islands several thousand miles apart. His theory was that they had originally come from Malaysia or Micronesia. French navigators were sure that they could not be related to the dark-skinned Melanesians in the vicinity of New Guinea. "The classification of three general groups of Pacific islanders - Polynesians ('many islands'), Melanesians ('dark islands') and Micronesians ('little islands') - was itself a European invention. Some of their differences, it now seems, may be only skin deep. Until recently, several archaeologists and linguists supported a view that ancestors of the Polynesians left Taiwan and mainland China 3,600 to 6,000 years ago. They spread through the Pacific relatively swiftly, largely bypassing Melanesia, which would explain why the Polynesians are not dark-skinned but speak an Austronesian language, rooted in Taiwan, instead of a Papuan language in parts of Melanesia. This view became known as the 'express train' model. But the model soon ran into trouble. Nothing resembling prototypes of the Lapita pottery has been found in Taiwan or southern China."

How Iroquois Artists Turned Trespassers Into Tourists

On January 11, Grace Glueck wrote a New York Times story headlined "How Iroquois Artists Turned Trespassers Into Tourists."

Glueck wrote: "Faced with continuing loss of their lands and the decline of hunting and fishing in the 19th century, the Iroquois nations of New York State and Canada came up with a successful survival strategy: they would sell tourists the fancy beadwork they had long done for themselves. And so a flourishing cottage industry was born. Moccasins, bags, pincushions, needle cases, sport and smoking caps, picture frames, jewelry, match holders, clothing and hanging baskets were brilliantly stitched with tiny glass beads by women, using tribal themes but also adapting to the Victorian tastes of their buyers. They were sold - and still are - at Niagara Falls and other sites near Iroquois communities.

"But the show 'Across Borders: Beadwork in Iroquois Life' at the George Gustav Heye Center of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian lays to rest any idea that the tourist items were mostly made-for-the-trade tchotchkes. Done with a vital design sense and extraordinary handcraft, they are part of a long line of Iroquois beadwork that goes back hundreds of years to a time when beads made from shells and bird bones were used instead of the tiny glass cylinders first brought to North America by European explorers in the 16th century.

"The show presents more than 300 items from before European influence to the present. It was organized by the McCord Museum of Montreal and the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University in collaboration with the Kanien'kehaka Raotitiohkwa Cultural Center, on the Kahnawake reservation in Canada the Tuscarora Nation community beadworkers in New York State and the Royal Ontario Museum of Toronto. Many of the items are from the 19th century, including a large selection of objects made for tourists. Background material includes a large wampum belt from the late 18th century woven of shell beads, one of many wampum 'documents' used for record keeping in the absence of a written language examples of trade silver ornaments made by Europeans as gifts for tribes in North America and samples of early Venetian glass beads, dating from the 1580's to the 1630's.

Records show that glass beads were first supplied to the Mohawks, one of the six Iroquois nations, as early as 1616, and by the 18th century commercial beads were in widespread use. Before that, quill work, using dyed porcupine quills, was a preferred form of decoration. But the stiffness of the quills made them more suitable for geometric design. Abundant plant life in the Iroquois regions suggested the use of curvy forms with leaf and floral patterns, and beads were more amenable to the working of these more delicate motifs.

"Significant tribal symbols relating to the Iroquois cosmology are also prevalent in the works. Among them is the Sky Dome, a half circle resting on two parallel lines, with a pair of simplified plant forms springing from the dome's top. The dome signifies the arc of the sky, the parallel lines the earth. The plant forms represent the celestial tree of life that stands at the center of the world, bearing the sun and the moon aloft in its branches.

"The symbol, enhanced by elaborate scrollwork, was often used to adorn women's leggings and more recently for the neckline of a knockout red velvet evening gown designed in 1997 by Tammy Beauvais, a Mohawk. It is heavily beaded with the Sky Dome motif in white, accented by double curves, another theme derived from the Iroquois world view.

"Tribal motifs also include the sun in stylized form, the celestial tree as a floral design enriched by fruits, the mythological turtle on which the earth was built and other animal clan figures. In earlier work the use of symbols was enhanced by striking patterns of white beads on the edges of garments like a handsome black Canadian waistcoat from the mid-19th century, whose front opening is edged in a lacy design of stylized flowers springing from tiny triangles with a row of beaded curves simulating scalloping along the bottom of the vest.

"But by then the Iroquois, tuning in to the larger world, were beginning to use a new style of embroidery more reflective of Victorian taste and combining their own symbols with European and North American elements. The beading became fuller and more florid, creating an embossed, bas- relief effect and often covering most of the background. A wider color range brought in more dark and medium tones.

"Examples abound in the form of pouches and purses (the Iroquois shared the Victorian love of bags), pincushions, caps and such made for tourists. In an apparent copying of European decorative art forms a Tuscarora beaded handbag, made between 1850 and 1910 and cut in a perky curvaceous shape, is covered with floral elements sophisticatedly worked in red, blue, white, yellow and other colors, the whole framed by a variety of neat white borders.

"Pincushions made to hold long hatpins and in smaller versions sewing needles were one of the most popular items sold by Iroquois beaders. Boot shapes in beads and fabric were an Iroquois specialty, and one 19th-century Mohawk beader, Mae Goodleaf, went so far as to make one in the form of a woman's leg. Another 19th-century Mohawk pincushion, maker unknown, occurs in the form of a six-pointed star embroidered in white beads with a black center containing a white eagle bearing an American flag on each wing.

"Headgear took the form of heavily beaded caps for sports, for smoking and for general use. Of the sports caps, reminiscent of the ubiquitous baseball toppers that men wear today except that they have shorter visors, two treasures are a jaunty number from between 1850 and 1910 heavily encrusted with gray floral beading on a dark gray ground and a small but sumptuous football cap worn by a McGill University player in the 1890's. The most popular hat made by Iroquois beaders was the glengarry, the snappy Scottish head warmer creased lengthwise across the top and often trimmed with short ribbons at the back. The heavily beaded versions in the show were probably derived from the military uniforms worn by some British regiments serving in Canada.

"Beads, of course, adorned all manner of Indian outfits, but a particularly fetching one is the deerskin ensemble worn by one of the best-known Mohawk entertainers, Princess White Deer, nee Esther Deer (1891- 1992). A member of a family enterprise, 'The Famous Deer Brothers Champion Indian Trick Riders of the World,' which performed across Europe and America in the early 1900's, she became an acclaimed singer and dancer in American vaudeville shows.

"Her playful costume, from about 1910 to 1920, consisted of a beaded deerskin bikini, a bra top, a headdress and boots with beaded cuffs. The beaded symbols include several swastikas, an ancient motif used by aboriginal artists and thought to represent the sun and the cycle of time, predating by millenniums the adoption of the sign by the Nazi Party. As a whole the outfit is strictly Mohawk-Hollywood.

"The exhibition contains many items recently made by Iroquois beaders who have revivified the art, although it must be admitted that this is the area where the kitsch really begins to creep in. Among their more exotic contributions are a group of Barbie dolls, adorned with feathers and beads by Noreen Reese of the Cayuga nation, a jeans jacket with a beaded Buffalo Bill football team medallion, made by Cheryl Greene of the Onandaga tribe, a marionette in a beaded outfit, made by Iris Stacey, a Mohawk, and a pair of beaded running shoes made by Loretta Jabokwoam of the Woodland Cultural Center in Brantford, Ontario. The show adds up to a resplendent eyeful and persuades the viewer that the beadwork was an important means of exchange between the Iroquois and their European- North American contacts.

"But one complaint: as usual, the museum has overdone the installation in this case, by using aluminum poles to frame most of the exhibits. The attempt is to suggest the longhouse, the communal living quarters that traditionally housed Iroquois tribes. The poles not only fail to evoke the longhouse but also interfere with viewing."

'Across Borders: Beadwork in Iroquois Life' remains at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, 1 Bowling Green, Lower Manhattan, (212)514-3700, through May 19.

Eagle Smuggler will Spend Two Years On Ice

From the Environmental News Service on the Internet via Norman Hurst: "Eagle Smuggler will Spend Two Years On Ice"

"WASHINGTON, DC, January 22, 2002 (ENS) - A Canadian man has been sentenced to 24 months in prison for paying people to shoot eagles, and selling eagle parts to Native American tribes." For full text and graphics visit: http://ens-news.com/ens/jan2002/2002L-01-22-07.html

Illicit Antiquities and a test case for Solomon: The Trial of a Dealer Divides the Art World

Although Celetine Bohlen's January 30, 2002, story in The New York Times, "Illicit Antiquities and a test case for Solomon: The Trial of a Dealer Divides the Art World" is about a dealer in Egyptian antiquities, the story has resonance for many ATADA members.

"It is a long way," the story begins, "from the ancient tombs of Egypt to a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan. But jurors in the criminal trial of a prominent New York City antiquities dealer are making that leap this week in a case that has injected anxiety into the rarefied and secretive world of antiquities traders.

"Frederick Schultz, owner of Frederick Schultz Ancient Art at on the 11th floor at 41 East 57th Street, has been charged with conspiring in the early 1990's to sell ancient objects that had been taken out of Egypt in violation of a 1983 Egyptian law. That law declared all newly discovered antiquities and those still in the ground to be the property of the Egyptian state.

"In other words, the federal government is accusing Mr. Schultz - who last year was president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art - of trafficking in stolen property. Furthermore, the prosecution charges, he not only knew that the objects were stolen but also conspired to create fake labels, baked in an oven, so he could pretend they came from a previously unknown collection of antiquities brought from Egypt by a mysterious Englishman in the 1920's. The case, seen by many as a test of the American government's resolve on stolen antiquities, has divided the art world. It has sent a chill through antiquities dealers who fear more aggressive policing in an area where proof of provenance can be hard to come by, and it has greatly cheered archaeologists who hope that such prosecutions will help cool the illicit antiquities trade. Archaeologists and art dealers have always been at odds over the best way to preserve and display the treasures that continue to be unearthed from sites all over the world. Dealers, typically supported by museum curators, argue that these ancient objects, if legally excavated, should be made available to a wide audience that will learn and benefit from them. Archaeologists maintain that unless tightly regulated, the lucrative antiquities trade encourages the looting of archaeological sites, destroying clues about how, when and why the objects were created. A parallel debate continues between rich countries like the United States that want to acquire artifacts of ancient civilizations, and poor countries like Egypt that have belatedly understood how much of their cultural patrimony is leaving their shores.

'For these countries, these are hard assets, first because they define national identity and secondly because they are worth money,' said Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and chairman of the Arts Issue Committee of the Association of Art Museum Directors. But Dr. Vikan worries that museums in the United States may be shortchanged as antiquities dealers become increasingly fearful. 'This is bound to have a chilling impact on the dealing community, and that is a big deal, because insofar as that happens, there will be less out there for the buying community,' he said. And so the debate over who is entitled to the remains of once- great civilizations goes back and forth, swinging through history like a pendulum that never comes to rest. Greece still keeps after Britain to return, if only on loan, the Elgin marbles, frieze fragments taken from the Parthenon to London by Lord Elgin nearly 200 years ago. The destruction of Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan last spring was seized upon by museum directors and dealers as an example of how ancient objects can sometimes be exposed to greater risk when they are left at home.

"Over the last 30 years, international conventions and national laws have tightened control of the illicit antiquities trade. The issue in the Schultz case is how far the American authorities are ready to go to prosecute those who deal in cultural objects that other countries have declared to be government property. For Mr. Schultz himself, the key issue will be whether he knew the objects were stolen, or whether he was duped.

As the trial opened on Monday before Judge Jed S. Rakoff in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defense, which last month lost a motion to dismiss the indictment on legal grounds, went on the offensive. It accused the government's key witness - Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, a British restorer, art dealer and convicted smuggler who first acquired the stolen goods from Egypt - of being a pathological liar.

" 'There is not a thing this man will not lie about,' said Linda Imes, a lawyer for Mr. Schultz, who sat calmly through the opening arguments in a gray suit, writing notes with an expensive pen. Mr. Tokeley-Parry, described by the defense as a man of dazzling charm who is out to take revenge on Mr. Schultz. In 1997 Britain convicted him of assisting in the handling of stolen goods, and he served three years of a six year sentence. He is expected to testify today.

"The government's case rests on expert testimony, bank transfers and correspondence between Mr. Tokeley-Parry and Mr. Schultz, much of it collected by Scotland Yard. In his opening argument on Monday, Peter Neiman, assistant United States attorney, said the evidence would show that the two conspired to come up with a cover story to sell objects that both knew had been illegally taken from Egypt.

"The cover story, Mr. Neiman said, consisted of a fabricated tale of an Englishman, one Thomas Alcock, who collected Egyptian antiquities in the 1920's. To bolster the claim, Mr. Neiman continued, the two made up labels that were baked in an oven to give them the authentic glow of age.

"Among the objects offered by Mr. Schultz were a stone head of Amenhotep III, an Egyptian pharaoh in the 14th century B.C., and a striding figure in limestone, described as a nobleman from the sixth dynasty, more than 2000 B.C. He was nicknamed George. In testimony Monday, James Romano, curator of the Egyptian collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, described how George was offered to him by Mr. Schultz for $600,000 on March 9, 1993. The indictment says Mr. Tokeley-Parry sent Mr. Schultz a fax in October 1992 telling him that he had acquired the top half of George and needed money to buy the bottom half later that month Mr. Schultz sent 60,000 British pounds, or $99,000, to Mr. Tokeley-Parry, the indictment said.

"Mr. Romano said he was told by Mr. Schultz that the object came from an old British collection. 'We will not knowingly acquire anything unless we know that it had been out of Egypt since 1983,' he said.

"In a 'friend of the court' brief, lawyers for national art and antiquities dealers' associations, together with the auction house Christie's and an international coin dealers' association all argued that the case could have a 'catastrophic impact on the art world and the public interests it serves.'

" 'It is a ratcheting up of a trend, where the U.S. government has been increasingly active, acting on behalf of foreign governments in this field,' said Jonathan Bloom, a lawyer in the firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, which represents the four dealers' groups. 'It is fairly obvious the kind of impact this can have on the art market,' Mr. Bloom continued. 'Had this legal regime been in place in say 1875, then we wouldn't have the kind of art collections that we have today in American museums.'

"Interestingly, however, no American museum or any of the associations that represent them joined in the brief supporting the motion to dismiss the indictment, which one lawyer said might be due to their reluctance to become involved in a case about stolen goods.

"In the motion to dismiss the indictment, Mr. Schultz and his supporters argued that foreign cultural property laws are sweeping, ambiguous and contrary to American notions of private property and should not be the basis for criminal prosecution in the United States. Instead, it argued, American law in this area should be solely defined by the 1983 Cultural Property Implementation Act, the instrument of American compliance with a 1970 international convention set forth by UNESCO.

"In his brief, the federal prosecutor, supported by a 'friend of court' brief filed by archaeological organizations, argued that the purpose of the Cultural Property Act was to enhance protection for foreign antiquities and not foreclose criminal prosecution of those who deal in stolen objects.

"In his decision early this month, Judge Rakoff found that Mr. Schultz and the art dealers were confusing two distinctly different legal approaches. The Cultural Property law is concerned with "balancing foreign and domestic import and export laws and policies, not deterring theft," he wrote. His decision was welcomed by archaeologists. 'Our belief is that if people find it difficult to sell these objects on the art market, if they fear the objects might be seized and they might end in court, it might be a deterrent,' said Nancy Wilkie, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, who also noted that criminal prosecutions of dealers have been exceedingly rare.

"But to antiquities dealers, who already feel constrained by recent changes in American customs laws, the Schultz case is seen as another blow. 'What the United States is doing is quite radical and quite to the contrary of the interest of museums, the public, the dealers and the auction houses,' said William Pearlstein, a lawyer for the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art. 'I think the government is out to squelch the antiquities trade, and no one is taking into account the interest of the public it serves.' "

And from the New York Winter Antiquities Show.

From Roberta Smith's January 21 New York Times review of the New York Winter Antiques Show:

".The quality in the non-European booths is high. At Donald Ellis, among a series of impressive Eskimo masks, don't miss a cluster of startlingly modern ninth-century Peruvian votive plaques of ceramic painted with geometric motifs. Throckmorton has a Nasca shaman's poncho in red, yellow and blue feathers, an unusually realistic Aztec head in basalt and four Indonesian tie-dye ceremonial wedding cloths whose luminous colors and central soft-edged rectangles can evoke the work of Mark Rothko. Equally engrossing is the American Indian material nearby at Morning Star, including several earthenware storage jars, especially the example of circa-1840 blackware (in the booth's far upper right corner) from the San Juan Pueblo. In between Throckmorton and Morning Star is another outstanding newcomer, Rupert Wace Ancient Art, with a display that roams the ancient world and culminates in the most expensive piece in the show, a Hellenistic hollow-cast bronze male nude, possibly Poseidon, about three-quarters human size, beautifully muscled and intact down to its inlaid eyes. Priced at $4 million, it is being sold by the British Radio Pension Fund and is said to be the last such work of its quality in private hands."

An Astonishing Display of Oceanic Art

"An Astonishing Display of Oceanic Art," Kenneth Baker's review of an exhibit at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on February 6.

A happy coincidence brings 'Masterworks of New Guinea Art: Selections From the Marcia and John Friede Collection' to the Legion of Honor concurrently with 'Dreaming With Open Eyes: Dada and Surrealist Art From the Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection.'

"The 19 astonishing objects of Oceanic art being exhibited have come to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco by gift and purchase from eminent New York collectors Marcia and John Friede. Several were acquired through the Fine Arts Museums' Phyllis Wattis Purchase Fund.

An agreement with the Friedes promises that hundreds more artifacts belonging to them will follow those on view at the Fine Arts Museums, which would make the de Young Museum one of the great repositories of Oceanic art in America when it reopens in 2005.

'The surrealist adventure. . . . is inseparable from the seduction, the fascination they exerted over us,' Andre Breton, founder of Surrealism, wrote of Oceanic art in 1948. Visitors to the Legion will sense that the New Guinea artifacts spring from assumptions about the power of images very different from our own.

"At one time, close to its classical and iconic roots, Western art aspired to magical functions: literally to conjure the presence or spiritual force of a depicted figure. But the modern world thinks of the art object as a stimulus to contemplation and enjoyment rather than an incantatory device.

" 'On one side of the barricade,' Breton wrote of the divide between Western and Oceanic art, 'we find the perpetual variations on the external appearances of man and animals, which naturally can attain to style through a gradual refinement of those appearances. . . . On the other side, we find the . . . greatest effort ever to account for the interpenetration of mind and matter, to overcome the dualism of perception and representation, not to stop at the bark but to return to the sap. . . .'

"Ignore the gulf between New Guinea tribal and contemporary Western beliefs, or try to explain it, the Oceanic artifacts on view still have an intensity of presence that modern painting and sculpture seldom achieve. Some of the more bizarre Surrealist inventions in "Dreaming With Open Eyes" appear to strive, with faint success, for the spooky energy the New Guinea artifacts exude. But whereas the Surrealists tried to draw power from prevailing modern uncertainty about the workings of art objects, the New Guinea tribal artists evidently worked with a clear, common sense of their creations' social and spiritual purpose.

"Our culture shares to some extent, and for reasons of its own, the Oceanic tribal belief in the face and head as centers of personal identity and animus, as reflected by the primacy of human heads in the New Guinea artifacts on view. But we lack myths to magnify the power of a face as we see it done in the pattern that decorates the 'Skull Rack' on display or the 'Gable Mask.' Had it emerged from a matrix of lived belief, the striking figuration of these objects might appear merely stylized, as so many Surrealist oddities do.

"To the Surrealist, Breton wrote, Oceanic artifacts laid bare 'the primordial fears that civilized life, or what passes as such, has masked - although they have not become any less pernicious, far from it, as a result of being repressed.' Even if Breton is wrong, the disquieting effect of the New Guinea artifacts at the Legion begs to be explained. To dwell on their graces of craft and formal invention seems like postponement of a reckoning with their uncanny force.

"The Fine Arts Museums displays its new Oceanic acquisitions now partly to coincide with the annual Tribal Arts Show, which opens tomorrow evening at Fort Mason Center. Proceeds from the gala opening will benefit the building fund for the new de Young Museum, specifically the galleries devoted to arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. For more information, call (415) 750-3518."

Lloyd Kiva New, 86, Teacher of Indian Artists, Is Dead

"Lloyd Kiva New, 86, Teacher of Indian Artists, Is Dead" read the headline for Mr. New's February 10 obituary in The New York Times.

The obituary: "Lloyd Kiva New, an artist and designer who taught generations of American Indian artists at the Institute of American Indian Arts, an innovative school that he and a colleague founded in Santa Fe, N.M., died on Friday in a hospital in Santa Fe, where he lived. He was 86.

"Mr. New, a Cherokee born in Oklahoma, was the first art director and the longtime president of the institute, which had a predominantly Native American faculty. He had a broad, humanistic approach to the arts, stressing creative links to the traditional arts but urging students not to be bound by them and to reject stereotypical notions of American Indian art and culture. 'He felt that the tradition should serve as the basis for contemporary native artists to flex their imagination and creativity,' said Rick West, the director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. 'He liberated native artists,' Mr. West said.

"Beginning in 1946, when he set up a studio in Scottsdale, Ariz., he sold Cherokee-derived designs to Neiman-Marcus and other stores. Mr. New gave up a career as a fashion designer in the late 1950's for a number of progressive educational projects, including the Southwest Indian Arts Project and the Phoenix Indian School.

"In 1962 he and Dr. George Boyce founded the Institute of American Indian Arts, which was financed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the Department of the Interior. The school began as a two-year program offering high school diplomas and is now a four-year college.

"A former faculty member, Dave Warren, described the environment Mr. New fostered at the institute as an 'intertribal experience' in which students from tribes around the country rediscovered their own heritage and shared it with others. The school attracted worldwide attention and was broadly influential in its approach. 'The creative genius behind what he did is not only in serving American Indian artists,' Mr. Warren said, 'but finding a way to look at the meaning of art and culture and put them into an institution and a philosophy.'

"Mr. New retired as full-time president of the institute in 1978 but remained president emeritus. He also served as an adviser on the creation of the National Museum of the American Indian and in the ongoing debate about its planned campus on the Mall in Washington. In 2000 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Art Institute of Chicago."

Schultz follow-up: Dealer Is Guilty of Selling Stolen Egyptian Art

Celestine Boghlen's New York Times February 13 story read "A prominent New York antiquities dealer was convicted yesterday in federal court on a charge of conspiring to sell ancient artifacts that had been illegally taken out of Egypt. It took the jury four and a half hours to return a guilty verdict against Frederick Schultz, a former president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art, who has been on trial before Judge Jed S. Rakoff in United States District Court for the Southern District since Jan. 28.

"Mr. Schultz's conviction is expected to have wide repercussions for the antiquities trade. Dealers in ancient art, many of whom are in New York, have been feeling great pressure in recent years from countries that are increasingly protective of their cultural patrimonies.

"At the heart of the Schultz case was a 1983 Egyptian law that declared all newly discovered antiquities, and any ancient artifacts yet to be unearthed, to be the property of the Egyptian government. Other countries have passed similar cultural-heritage laws.

"The trial was closely watched as a test of the application of the National Stolen Property Act in cases where the antiquities theft has taken place overseas. The indictment was seen as a sign that the federal government intended to follow through with aggressive enforcement here. 'The looting of artifacts deprives nations of their heritage and humankind of valuable archaeological knowledge,' United States Attorney James B. Comey said in a statement issued late yesterday. 'This conviction sends the message that the United States will aggressively pursue such crimes and those who traffic in looted artifacts.'

"In a statement, the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art said it 'regrets' the conviction of Mr. Schultz, and added that it regarded the case as a 'an isolated incident that does not reflect the high standards and prudent practices of the association's members.'

"Mr. Schultz's lawyers could not be reached for comment yesterday evening, and it is not known whether they will appeal. A sentencing hearing has been set for May 30. The maximum sentence is five years in jail and a fine of $250,000.

"William G. Pearlstein, a lawyer who represents the antiquities dealers' association, said an appeal might turn on the issue of the applicability of the National Stolen Property Act. This point had been raised by Mr. Schultz's lawyers in a motion to dismiss the indictment. That motion was denied by Judge Rakoff. A key witness, Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, a Briton previously convicted on smuggling charges, testified that Mr. Schultz took an active part in a conspiracy to disguise stolen artifacts - including a $1-million stone head of a pharaoh - to make them look as if they had come from an English collection dating to the 1920's.

"Mr. Tokeley-Parry, who was on the stand for three days, said that he and Mr. Schultz had concocted a fictitious Thomas Alcock collection, named for Mr. Tokeley-Parry's great uncle, and made false labels to account for the objects' provenance. In closing arguments today, David Spears, a defense lawyer, argued that Mr. Schultz had been duped by Mr. Tokeley-Parry, whom Mr. Spears described as a 'manipulative master predator.' Mr. Spears also argued that Mr. Schultz had not been aware of the 1983 Egyptian law.

"In his rebuttal, Peter Neiman, an assistant United States attorney, said that any suggestion that Mr. Schultz, a Princeton-educated antiquities dealer who specialized in Egyptian artifacts, did not know about the 1983 law was preposterous. 'The man's business is buying and selling Egyptian antiquities,' he said. 'Anybody in the business for 10 minutes would know there is nothing out there that is fresh out of Egypt.' "

It's ba-a-ck (we never thought it went away) - turquoise, that is

From People Weekly, March 4, 2002: "Hot Rocks - Weary of dripping in diamonds? .Then take a hint from stars such as Sophia Loren, Patricia Heaton and Allsion Janney and try a necklace made of turquoise. The look of this gemstone.is currently hotter than a rodeo seat in August." Advises a Los Angeles stylist: 'Don't pile it on. It will be in style for the next year or two, so pace yourself.' "

The Far Eastern-meets-Southwestern Look

And from Sunday Styles in The New York Times, February 24, 2002: "This season, the Far Eastern-meets-Southwestern look has found yet another style junction, in turquoise stones, which are scattered on women's clothing and accessories." The Times story-ette highlights an Yves Saint Laurent turquoise-encrusted clutch selling for $1,895 that is becoming the YSL Madison avenue boutique's best selling handbag.

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