2003 Media Files Page

Articles reprinted in 2003 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 Winter 2003 Issue of The ATADA Newsletter

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Winter_2003

Poisoned Gods: As museums return stolen religious artifacts, Native Americans are learning that their most sacred objects may kill them

"Poisoned Gods," a long, important story dealing with contaminated American Indian artifacts, dangerous pesticides, the repatriation of sacred objects and more by Matt Palmquist, appeared in the September 4 issue of SF Weekly, a small Bay Area newspaper. "As museums return stolen religious artifacts, Native Americans are learning that their most sacred objects may kill them," read the sub-headline.

The story began: "The Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, the largest in California, occupies 12 square miles of northeast Humboldt County, nestled amid some of the state's most stunning terrain. Its main street is Route 96, the Bigfoot Scenic Byway, which rides the banks of the Trinity River as it swoops from forested mountain slopes to the valley floor and into the town of Hoopa. Here, the highway shares its shoulders with less appealing scenery: dilapidated houses, lawns rotting beneath rusted cars, and gaggles of the reservation's unemployed (about one-third of its 3,000-plus residents) loitering in the shade of boarded-up businesses. In the strip mall that serves as Hoopa's hub, where empty parking spaces bake on a midsummer morning, the rare sight of an out-of-town visitor prompts a long-haired teenager in a Cleveland Indians cap -- worn with no apparent trace of irony -- to ask, 'Are you the guy who wants to see the museum?'

"Tucked between a grocery store and the Lucky Bear Casino -- where the weekend crowd rarely numbers more than 15 -- the Hoopa Valley Tribal Museum is hard to find, but worth seeking out. Built in the mid-1970s as a storehouse for the tribe's sacred dance regalia, the one-room museum has evolved into a humble yet dignified showcase for Hoopa history. Glass cases filled with hand-woven baskets, intricate quivers, and ceremonial dresses reveal the tribe's commitment to custom, and century-spanning photographs of costumed dancers and medicine men suggest the enduring relevance of ritual and religion.

"'Our dances are the same today as they were a thousand years ago,' says curator David Hostler, a rotund 69-year-old who ambles through the aisles slowed by two artificial knees, an artificial hip, and deep, sporadic coughing bouts that leave him wheezing for minutes afterward. 'Everything we make, whether it's basketry or regalia, comes from our heart, from our feeling of goodness, from our creator making our dances carry on forever. When the regalia don't dance, they cry. We believe that very strongly.'

"Sacred regalia play a crucial role in the Hoopa religion, which centers around the belief that the world will perish unless it is periodically renewed. Artifacts have their own creation stories and gender, cannot be bought or sold, and embody the spirit of the creator, which must be appeased through numerous rituals designed to ensure the perpetuation of the valley's resources. When Hostler was appointed museum director five years ago, he began learning about federal repatriation laws, which allow tribes to lobby institutions for the return of stolen sacred items. In his first stab at using the law, Hostler requested and received an inventory list from administrators at Harvard University's Peabody Museum, who invited him to fly east and inspect the museum's 500 Hoopa artifacts for himself.

"'As we started going through the collections, I was forewarned to wear gloves and a breathing apparatus,' says Hostler, motioning for the kid in the Indians cap to scale a ladder, reach into a gloomy loft, and bring down a taped-up box. 'They said, "We don't know what's on this stuff, but to be safe, you should wear gloves." I didn't get no clear understanding of the problem until I got back, but that's when I first learned about the poison.'

"Hostler carefully opens the lid of the box, which rarely comes down from its perch, and snaps on a pair of blue latex gloves. The first object he unwraps is a small brown basket, spun out of the wild iris that blooms on the surrounding mountains, woven tightly enough to hold water. 'This is a Jump Dance basket,' Hostler says softly, referring to one of the tribe's holiest ceremonies. 'It's very sacred to us. Just by looking at this, I would say it's probably 1,000 years old.'

"But aside from a few minor rips, the basket appears as if it hasn't aged a day. And therein lies the problem: As late as the 1960s, it was common practice for museums and collectors to preserve artifacts -- and to ward off bugs and rodents -- by applying a variety of toxic pesticides, including mercury, arsenic, and the now-banned DDT. In the wake of a federal repatriation law passed in the early 1990s, Native Americans have realized what was previously known only to museum workers: Virtually every organic artifact collected before the second half of the 20th century has been contaminated. Because the problem is so new, no data exist on the correlation between contaminated artifacts and health defects, especially among the little-studied Native American population. But experts advise tribes to play it safe and not use the objects as tradition dictates, meaning they shouldn't be buried, burned, worn, placed under beds or on tables, enshrined in sacred buildings, or even displayed in museums.

"Federal law compels institutions to return artifacts only if they are used in religious ceremonies, leaving tribal leaders like Hostler in a conundrum: Their regalia, after being stolen by whites, contaminated in museums, and returned at great expense to the tribes, are too poisoned to use and too precious to pack away. If they bury the items, they risk contaminating the soil and poisoning their ground water if they burn them, they risk scarring their lungs by inhaling the pollutants. In short, Hostler's initial excitement about repatriation, envisioned as a means to reopen long-lost connections with his most sacred beliefs, has been displaced by the fear that communicating with his God could wind up killing him.

"'Their gods, their ritual objects, their means of communicating with their gods have been poisoned,' says Niccolo Caldararo, one of a team of San Francisco State experts who have formed an unusual partnership with the Hoopa in an effort to unravel the nationwide problem. 'So how are they going to function? Can they still function in a ritual sense? The tribes' reaction is, "Jesus, we just want to use them in our religion. And you guys have poisoned us and you can't help us. This is just the same way we've been oppressed forever."'

"The use of heavy metals as preservatives dates to at least the 16th century, when various forms of arsenic and mercury salts were either dissolved in water and sprayed on objects or applied as a bath in solution. As the dangers of mercury became better known, curators began using organic pesticides -- such as thymol, DDT, and naphthalene, the active ingredient in mothballs -- or combinations of several different pesticides. Still, the reliance on toxic pesticides was pretty much ignored until the 1960s.

"'People would open up books of botanical specimens collected in the 17th century, and they'd find arsenic crystals on the pages,' Caldararo says. 'A lot of mercury was used on these, too. It was understood in the field that the chronic illnesses some of the people were having in collections was because of the pesticides being applied.'

"By the 1980s, sporadic mentions of the problem began popping up in academic journals, and some researchers finally started to investigate the extent of the contamination. Although the findings led museums to gradually abandon hazardous pesticides in favor of modern integrated pest management procedures, the damage to the collections had already been done.

"'I've always told people that if it's organic, if it's fur or fiber, and it's over 50 years old, it's been dosed pretty heavily,' says Richard Hitchcock, the repatriation coordinator at Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. 'You can look at two items with fur on them -- one of them looks good and one of them looks like a piece of rawhide -- and you can certainly tell which items have been affected.'

"The museums' dirty little secret was largely their own until 1990, when then-President George Bush signed into law the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, for short). Pushed through by powerful tribes like Arizona's Hopi (who have halted their repatriation efforts after reclaiming one Kachina mask that was classified as toxic waste by the Arizona scientists who tested it), the law requires federally funded institutions to return human remains and objects found in Native American graves to their original tribes. This aspect of the law has received the most media attention, owing to the high-profile tussle between tribes and scientists over the 9,000-year-old skeletal remains of the Kennewick Man found in Washington state. Local tribes have claimed ownership of the bones and demanded their immediate return for burial scientists have asserted their right to study what they call the oldest and best-preserved human skeleton ever discovered in North America. The U. S. District Court in Portland, Ore., is expected to issue a decision on ownership rights any day.

"The law also allows tribes to request the return of objects they deem 'indispensable' -- in other words, usable religious artifacts that still occupy a key role in sacred ceremonies. Because museums had until 1995 to compile an inventory of their collections and decide which tribes were owed what, most tribes have only recently begun to explore the law's complexities and contradictions.

"'It's a huge, long process,' says Dr. Lee Davis, who directs the California Studies program at San Francisco State and has spent a lifetime working with the Hoopa and other West Coast tribes. 'What the tribes in California want are the sacred, religious materials. In those cases, the tribes have to provide documentation as to why these items are sacred. The museums require that these objects were stolen, so you have to document that and go into the collector records. They have to hire outside people, which costs a lot of money. Very few tribes carry through with it.' "Even if tribes succeed in repatriation, the lack of pesticide treatment records for individual objects makes it difficult to ascertain which artifacts have been treated, what they were treated with, and whether the level of contamination represents a significant health risk. But the experts do agree on one thing: There's no proven method to remove the pesticides.

"'The problem's never going to get solved -- just forget about solving it,' says Monona Rossol, a New York-based industrial hygienist who is one of the few specializing in artistic objects. 'There are so many different types of problems, so many types of chemicals. Unless you have some horrendous amount of chemical analysis on each object, you don't even know what you've got there. And I don't think anyone in their right mind would fund a large-scale study, because there are too many variables.'

"The law requires museums to disclose to tribes that their artifacts may be contaminated, but it does not compel them to perform the expensive, often inconclusive, tests for the presence of pesticides. A state NAGPRA law, passed in October 2001 and scheduled to kick in next year, extends repatriation rights to non-federally recognized tribes, but conspicuously makes no mention of contamination.

"'It wasn't in the bill because we didn't give it a thought,' Steve Banegas, a councilman for the Barona tribe in San Diego and the bill's primary advocate, says. 'It's all new to everybody, and it's an easy thing to overlook. But now that we know about it, we want to know how to handle it. We need to sit down with the institutions as equals, with trust.'

"That isn't likely to happen while the question of liability is still unanswered. Most tribes want institutions to pay for testing, but museums, whose own workers run the greatest risk of contamination, point out that the poisoning was unintentional, and that they don't have anywhere near the necessary funds to test every repatriated item.

"'The tribes feel that the state or the institutions should be paying for it, and that's perfectly reasonable and logical,' says Larry Myers, executive secretary of the California Native American Heritage Commission. 'They took the damn stuff. And now that they've given it back, it's in this condition. That's not making me whole -- it's another step in the genocide.' He pauses, heaving a wry-sounding sigh. 'Oh well, I guess we're not ever happy.'

"Jeff Fentress, San Francisco State's coordinator for the return of Indian remains and artifacts, stands in the school's archaeology department collection room, a cavernous lab filled with stacks of boxes waiting to be repatriated to California tribes. After glancing around the murky space, eerily quiet because students are gone for the summer, he says, 'I tested a lot of the trays and paper bags where artifacts were. Everything had mercury in it. And in some cases, arsenic.'

"Fentress' tests were spurred in part by the advice of three SFSU colleagues who had become involved in the artifact contamination problem, either directly or indirectly, as a result of the repatriation of Hoopa religious regalia.

"When David Hostler returned from Harvard wondering what he should do about the pesticides on his tribe's artifacts, he immediately sought the counsel of Lee Davis, director of SFSU's California Studies program and a longtime collaborator with the Hoopa on repatriation issues. Davis, who has worked in museums and complained about the contamination for decades, sensed an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the wider issue, and she asked Hostler if he would agree to testing of his repatriated artifacts he assented. So Davis persuaded Niccolo Caldararo -- an adjunct professor at SFSU who teaches medical anthropology and runs his own conservation company -- and chemical analyst Pete Palmer to visit Hoopa and come back with samples.

"'I had the good contacts, Nic had been a conservator, and Pete was a chemist,' Davis says.

"As Palmer and his students worked feverishly to run tests on the 200 samples they obtained at Hoopa, Davis and Caldararo lined up tribal leaders, conservators, industrial hygienists, experts from the Environmental Protection Agency, and a wide variety of academics to share what they knew about the poison problem. And in September of 2000, San Francisco State hosted one of the first conferences on the issue, with participants calling artifact contamination a national health problem that can be solved only by educating tribes, testing all repatriated materials, and launching large-scale studies on the correlation between Native American health defects and pesticides.

"At the conference, Palmer presented his data on the Hoopa's 17 repatriated artifacts: Nearly every sample had noteworthy levels of mercury, and many also showed thymol, p-dichlorobenzene, naphthalene, lindane, and DDT, all of which can be carcinogens. Conference participants produced a long list of safety and disclosure recommendations for museums, tribes, and government agencies. Most of the tribes and institutions have not acted on the issue, largely because they don't have treatment records and still don't know the possible long-term health effects of prolonged exposure to pesticides. What is known, Caldararo says, generally applies only to white, middle-aged males, whereas poverty-stricken Native Americans are at considerably more risk of contracting diseases.

"'We're talking about folks with weakened immune systems already,' says Yolanda Chavez, a former NAGPRA coordinator for California's Pomo tribe and a longtime collaborator with the SFSU team. 'So many suffer from diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. Ceremonially, most of the people do their sacred dances inside of a roundhouse, which is a huge, open-beamed, circular building with a fire in the center. You have the elders sitting around, the children, and when someone is dancing [with] the item, they're shaking their head, moving around vigorously. You're shaking arsenic off your headdress, it's floating around, and it could contaminate the entire roundhouse.'

Indeed, Chavez says she's heard numerous reports from tribal leaders who complained that prolonged contact with contaminated artifacts had given them headaches, dizzy spells, shortness of breath, and asthma attacks -- the first symptoms of sickness from pesticides. Hostler says he developed his hacking cough shortly after his initial visit to the Peabody Museum, where he felt faint in the dank, stagnant sublevel storage areas. Several Native American tribes, including the Hopi, already suffer from devastating infertility rates thought to result from radioactive contamination of their ground water and reservation lands experts fear pesticide-ridden artifacts might contribute to the problem.

"'We know very little about chronic exposure,' Caldararo says. 'We need research, and we don't have it.'

"Following the conference, Caldararo secured a grant from the National Park Service to hold six educational workshops for tribes throughout the state. During the sessions, Caldararo details safety precautions, gives guidelines for handling the artifacts, and entertains questions from the usually flabbergasted tribal representatives.

"Paulette Hennum, NAGPRA coordinator for the California Department of Parks and Recreation, helped Caldararo get the funding, and has spoken herself at many of the workshops. She says she hopes the sessions will serve as a model nationwide, but admits that aside from some easy advice -- apply mylar strips to contaminated headbands, for instance, to act as a barrier between the pesticides and sweaty skin -- she's unable to answer many of the toughest questions Native Americans pose.

"'What we say is, "Assume the worst,"' Hennum says. 'We go out and open this huge can of worms, and we give them a little band-aid: "Now you know, now you're scared, here's the smock, and good luck."'

"Bouncing along dirt back roads on a driving tour of Hoopa's ceremonial sites, David Hostler -- wearing generic blue pants and a green shirt unclasped at the top button, where the tip of the scar from his recent quintuple bypass surgery snakes across his smooth, tan skin -- articulates his religious beliefs in a refreshingly candid, worldly style.

"According to the cosmology of most Northwest California tribes, including the Hoopa, the natural balance of the world was established at the time of creation by a group of immortal, preternatural beings. That balance has wavered in human times, however, and can be restored only through renewal ceremonies attending the first acorn harvest, the first salmon feast, and other cyclical events essential to the well-being of the tribe. Presiding over the ceremonies and serving as symbolic representations of the immortals, shamanistic figures drape themselves in sacred regalia and recite esoteric chants thought to validate the current performance by recalling its spiritual origins, while dancers perform public re-enactments of spiritual death and rebirth.

"The Hoopa's two most sacred rituals of world renewal, the White Deerskin Dance and the Jump Dance, are performed to protect the public health and to aid crop growth. Dancers wear elaborate regalia of deer hide or cat kilts, dentalia-shell necklaces, wolf-fur headbands, and woodpecker-scalp headdresses, and carry deerskin-draped poles mounted with stuffed deer heads. The spirit of the creator is thought to be embodied in the regalia, whose ownership rights lie only with the immortals and not with the tribal members who wear them. Pacifying the spirits of their regalia, the Hoopa believe, will guarantee them luck in hunting and fishing, safety from death and destruction, and success in everything from weaving to gambling. However, if the ceremonies are not performed and the regalia are not prayed over, the natural and spiritual worlds will fall out of balance, bringing ruin to the Earth and death to the tribe.

"Every Native American tribe's belief system is different, and the purpose of regalia and ceremony varies from region to region. But in general, artifacts are viewed as irreplaceable vehicles of prayer and ritual, linking tribal members living and dead with their creator. And when an artifact is 'put down' because it can no longer be used, the interment or burning ritual is often as emotional and elaborate as that for a human being. Given the spiritual strength ascribed to sacred artifacts, some tribes have stubbornly insisted that their gods are powerful enough to overcome the pesticides. Others have even suggested that whites invented the issue to keep tribes from reclaiming their artifacts. But Hostler offers no such wild allegations or vitriol.

"'You go through stages of being angry,' Hostler says, then pauses for several heartbeats. 'If you let it dwell inside you,' he finally continues, 'it just builds and builds, until it becomes something you're always disturbed with. I don't like to hang onto that stuff. History is history, and you can't do nothing about it. If you knew my history, you'd know why I feel the way I do.'

"Hostler was born and raised in Hoopa Valley, and he dreaded even the short trip to Eureka because he always got carsick. He eventually enlisted in the Navy, along with several friends from the reservation, but his insular life in Hoopa had not prepared him for the culture shock of sharing boot camp with blacks, Southerners, Latinos, and white folks from as far away as New York. 'When you go down the aisle in your living quarters, you rub bellies, and you have to get along,' says Hostler, who later attended school in Southern California and opened a grocery store in Eureka before moving back to Hoopa. 'So I made up my mind to get along in this world.'

"Not every Native American confronted by the contamination issue has made the same pledge. But Larry Myers, a member of the Pomo tribe who heads the California Native American Heritage Commission, says frustration, rather than anger, has been the prominent emotion fueling tribal response.

"'You're almost there,' Myers says of repatriation, 'and suddenly this other thing pops up. You're not sure if it's real or not, but if it's real, it's dangerous as hell. And mixed in there is a lot of anger, but anger that's tempered by the fact that [the artifact is] ours, we have it, and they can't do with it what they want anymore. One of the concerns I've heard is this is a hoax, that people are lying to us. I don't know whether the people making that argument are willing to take this stuff home to their kids, but I would rather err on the side of caution.'

"Resting one hand on a shoulder-high helium tank and gesturing with the other toward the crammed and cluttered chemistry analysis lab behind him, Pete Palmer lets a weary grin sneak across his boyish face. 'It's kind of odd to hear Lee [Davis] sometimes talk about our artifact-testing lab,' he says. 'We don't have an artifact-testing lab. I think she just likes to refer to that, in the hopes that it will eventually come about. Really, we do things on a shoestring budget here. But it works.'

"As the resident chemist on the San Francisco State team (and the man whose office door bears a bumper sticker that says, 'Born to analyze'), Palmer was responsible for devising, essentially from scratch, methods to test David Hostler's sacred Hoopa artifacts. Aside from the challenges of identifying which organic pesticides to target and how to test for the presence of heavy metals (the standard spot test, which involves swabbing one area of an object, reveals only the surface-level contamination of that exact location), Palmer had to sample the artifacts without destroying them.

"'This is probably the largest sample we had,' says Palmer, holding up a vial containing a sliver of leather no bigger than a fingernail clipping. 'It's a piece of the backside of a leather hide, not visible from the front. With each object, we'd ask David, "Do you mind if we take a piece of the object?" And he said it was OK because they were contaminated.'

"Palmer balked, initially, when Davis and Niccolo Caldararo approached him for help with the artifact testing. Burdened by a full teaching load, he was already working on a side project for NASA analyzing air samples.

"'I thought, "I don't need this, I don't need to start solving someone else's problem,"' says Palmer, running a hand through his wispy brown hair. 'But a lot of times, one encounters an ivory tower attitude among scientists, and I see it in myself sometimes. The big boys with toys, you know, give 'em a lab and some expensive instruments, and they say, "Oh, yeah, we're doing cancer research." And 50, 100 years later, millions of dollars are spent, and it's still not solved. But this particular field of analytical chemistry is more suited toward community service than any other, and after I thought more about it, I agreed.'

"The so-called ivory tower attitude has long dogged this particular problem: Most chemists qualified to analyze artifacts won't waste their time on dusty Indian relics when NASA's knocking on their office doors. 'Any academic lab is capable of doing this,' says Palmer, who admits SFSU's budget and resources don't make it the ideal institution to lead the research effort. 'But you try asking most professors. Out of all the analytical chemists in the state, you might find a couple that are willing.'

"Then there's the issue of cost. These tests are complex and expensive, run on a pair of machines -- an atomic absorption spectrophotometer and a mass spectrometry unit -- that cost upward of $60,000 each to buy. In the past two years, Palmer has done quite a bit of free work for the few California tribes that, like the Hoopa, know enough to want their artifacts tested and he's relied on graduate students to perform the tests and compile the data.

"'If you farm this out to an analytical testing lab, it's not a cheap proposition,' Palmer says. 'The Native Americans, they don't have deep pockets. Everyone thinks they all run these gambling sites, but that's just a few tribes. Most tribes don't have that.'

"Which is why the SFSU team is trying to secure funding for a real artifact-testing lab. Palmer says he needs about $300,000 in start-up money -- enough to buy dedicated equipment and to pay graduate students for their time -- but so far, his grant requests have been turned down. And with few other institutions eager to follow San Francisco State's lead on the pesticide problem, advocates say the first step in solving it is persuading academics to study it.

"'You can't get a PH. D. out of this,' says Yolanda Chavez of the Pomo tribe. 'My response to that is: The person who comes up with a way of extracting arsenic out of an item doesn't have to worry about his PH. D. -- he'll probably get a Nobel Prize.'

"David Hostler sits on a cedar bench overlooking a sunken, walled pit (its Indian name is spelled qxnta and means house) that he says is hundreds of years old, if not thousands. For generations as far back as anyone can remember, the Hoopa have staged their Brush Dance ceremony here, surrounded by sweat lodges and other sacred buildings on the banks of the Trinity River. Performed twice each summer for the benefit of a sick or deformed child, the Brush Dance -- so named because a medicine man or woman traditionally waves burning fir sticks over the child -- usually attracts as many as 500 people, many of them from off the reservation, down the twisting gravel roads to the ceremonial site.

"The weekend-long event begins on a Thursday evening, when about 30 dancers in full regalia enter the dancing pit accompanied by chants and singing, and continues until about midnight. The mother sits on a stool or lies on a mattress in the pit, holding her sick child, prayed over by a medicine woman. Friday night is for resting, but on Saturday the dance lasts all night long, sometimes until 10 a.m. Sunday morning. And whenever it ends, Hostler says, the child comes out of the pit with a newfound, healthy glow.

"'I always like to brag about this,' Hostler says slyly, over the squawking of crows and the tumbling of the nearby Trinity. 'When my wife was a medicine woman here, there was a guy who was 7 years old. His body looked like he was only 3 or 4 -- he was very fragile, anemic. He couldn't eat no dairy products, drink no milk. But he was always told that if you go into that dance, you're going to get healed, and he had so much faith.' Hostler pauses to let a cough run its course, continuing when it leaves him with enough breath to wheeze. 'Well, the morning it ended, he said, "Mom, I'm going to have some cornflakes." And he went over there and had some. I see him today, he's about 35 years old now, he weighs about 250 pounds. He's a big, muscular, burly guy. All our kids that went through this turned out positive -- that's why we keep having it.'

"The items Hostler repatriated from Harvard remain swathed in cellophane, wrapped within garbage bags, packed in a long, low cardboard box with masking tape sealing the sides, and relegated to the junk-laden loft above Hostler's office. Although the 17 objects -- baskets, feathers, headbands, dance skirts, necklaces, and ringtailed-cat hides -- will never be displayed and cannot be employed in tribal ceremonies, Hostler brought some of the reclaimed regalia to the riverside site during one recent dance. He didn't wear any of the costumes, of course, but he draped a few of the items across a nearby bench, where they could take part in the dance as spectators rather than participants.

"'When you talk about feelings,' he says, 'I think the poison makes the regalia feel worse than I feel, because they can't be used. Our Indian belief is that everything is spiritually alive. The regalia know what we're talking about right now.'

"If they do, they hear Hostler tell one story he almost doesn't get through. Dropping his deadpan humor and letting his large, sad eyes fall to the ground, Hostler recalls one day a few years ago at the University of Pennsylvania, where he traveled with Lee Davis to inspect some of the Hoopa collection. When the staff brought out the regalia and warned him of the probable contamination, Hostler lost all control, overcome for the first time by the staggering spiritual power of artifacts he thought he'd never see.

"'I was looking at the most beautiful regalia,' Hostler says quietly. 'And I looked at it, and I literally cried, like a little baby, out loud, and I felt embarrassed when I got through.' His words thick, his lips still twisted by the words 'little baby,' Hostler clears his throat and looks away.

"'But what that was telling me was the regalia was crying, so it made me cry. I was always told that, but I never knew it until I literally cried out loud.' "

Planning a Homecoming for Indians' Remains

Another view of repatriation from The New York Times in a September 16 story by Michael Wilson was headlined "Planning a Homecoming for Indians' Remains."

"A raven, as the legend goes, grew tired, and so dropped stones into the sea and created the Haida Gwaii islands to have a place to rest," the story began. "Things did not work out so well for man.

"In the late 19th century, collectors visiting the islands, which belong to British Columbia and are just south of Alaska, left with the remains of hundreds of American Indians. In recent years, museums all over the world have identified Haida bones, skulls and entire skeletons as part of their collections.

"The descendants of the Haida (pronounced HY-dah) want the remains back. This week, the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side will hand over the bones of 48 Haidas, to be flown back to the islands, which were renamed the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1787.

"'We consider them to be our grandfathers and grandmothers,' said Nika Collison of Skidegate, on the northernmost island, a leader in the Haida repatriation movement and one of 25 delegates who flew to New York City on Saturday to fetch the remains, which the museum volunteered to turn over two years ago.

"Other requests for repatriation have not gone as smoothly, especially when museums were asked for valuable burial artifacts that they have carefully preserved.

"Scholars believe that the Haida remains were taken from the islands after a smallpox epidemic all but wiped out the tribes in the late 19th century, reducing the population to about 600 from 10,000. American Indians did not bury their dead then, but laid them to rest in special places above ground.

"No one knows the exact ages of the Haida remains, and individual remains cannot be identified without 'some crazy testing,' Ms. Collison said, for which there are no plans. 'Generally we know where they were taken from because of collectors' notes,' she said. About 14 of the 48 remains have yet to be traced to a specific part of the islands, which were a hub of fur trading between the Haida and Europeans.

"Today, the Haida make up about one-third of the islands' 6,000 residents, Ms. Collison said. The Haida Repatriation Committee, formed in 1995, is a group of volunteers devoted to bringing their ancestors back home for a proper burial.

"Canadian museums have returned more than 700 skeletal remains to American Indian communities in British Columbia, including the Haida. Last week, a museum in Oakland, Calif., became the first museum in the United States to hand over Haida remains, a skeleton. The American Museum of Natural History is the second. The remains of 138 Haidas are in the Field Museum in Chicago, Ms. Collison said, and an additional seven Haida bones are in museums in Washington.

"Yesterday, the Haida delegates performed native songs and dances at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan. The sound of handheld drums thundered through a large domed hall as men and women danced and chanted aboriginal songs. One man wore the costume of an eagle, another that of a raven, representing two towns on the northernmost island - Old Massett and Skidegate, about 70 miles south.

"There is a special repatriation song based on a butterfly, Ms. Collison explained to the crowd.

"'The butterfly is a culture that represents the traveling spirits and wandering souls of those who have left,' she said. 'Those ancestors are wandering.'

"On Thursday the delegates will meet with American Museum of Natural History officials for the first formal ceremony leading to the actual repatriation. After that, the remains, which are sealed in plastic containers, will be prayed over and spoken to in Haida, to comfort them. The only time they are to be left alone, Ms. Collison said, is during the plane trip back to British Columbia. Ceremonies on the islands will take place Sept. 26 and 28.

"Dorothy Bell, 85, of Old Massett, is the oldest of the delegates. She joined the group on a recent repatriation trip to Vancouver, British Columbia. 'We talked Haida' to the remains, she recalled, 'and said they're going back to Haida Gwaii, and they should be happy.' Then everyone heard drums in the distance, and took it as a sign that their ancestors 'were happy to go home.'

"'We see it as a healing process,' Andy Wilson, 49, a cultural interpreter for visitors to Skidegate, said of repatriation. 'When we got our numbers up, we realized we had to get to those museums to bring our ancestors home.'

"At the island ceremony later this month, food will be burned for 'feeding the spirits' of the dead, said Mary Swanson, 78. Those in attendance will feast as well, and each box of remains will be wrapped in a tiny blanket made by elementary school students.

"Then they will be buried, finally, and marked with a cross."

Maya Carvings Tell of 2 Superpowers

"Maya Carvings Tell of 2 Superpowers" was the headline of a front page story in The New York Times on September 19, 2002 by John Noble Wilford.

"When a hurricane ripped through the jungle of northern Guatemala a year ago," Wilford wrote, "an uprooted tree at the base of temple ruins at Dos Pilas exposed stones bearing one of the longest texts of Maya hieroglyphs ever found.

"Part of a grand staircase leading up the side of a pyramid, the inscribed stones recorded the triumphs and defeats of one city caught in the middle of protracted warfare between two superpowers - the city-states of Tikal and Calakmul - that split much of the Maya civilization some 1,500 years ago.

"The text is expected to cast light on the clashes of arms at the zenith of the classic Maya culture, which embraced much of central America and southern Mexico, and perhaps the causes of its eventual collapse, more than two centuries later.

"The translations of the Dos Pilas glyphs have just been completed by Federico Fahsen, a Guatemalan specialist in Maya writing, and were announced yesterday by Vanderbilt University and the National Geographic Society, which supported the research. The discovery will also be described in the October issue of National Geographic.

"Archaeologists and other Maya scholars said the hieroglyphic stairs revealed the largely unknown story of 60 years in the life of a Dos Pilas ruler, Balaj Chan K'awiil. It is at times a grisly account of flowing blood and piles of skulls after a battle was over and the vanquished were sacrificed. The ruler found himself at times on one side, then another, and must have been both clever and fortunate to have survived to a ripe age, some scholars said.

"Of particular importance, some scholars said, the Dos Pilas glyphs supported an emerging consensus that local and dynastic rivalries were not mainly responsible for most battles, as once supposed. Instead, much of the Maya world in those years was apparently in an almost constant state of belligerence between Tikal and Calakmul and their respective blocs of allies.

"One of the largest cities in Maya history, Tikal, then known as Mutul, was in what is now northern Guatemala, but had a much wider sphere of influence in the Maya world. Calakmul, known as the 'snake kingdom,' was about 60 miles farther north, in Mexico. The glyphs provide new evidence that Dos Pilas was established as a military outpost by Tikal, about 70 miles to the northeast of Dos Pilas, and was never a major city or independent power.

"'It now appears that Dos Pilas was a pawn in a much bigger battle,' said Dr. Arthur Demarest of Vanderbilt's Institute of Mesoamerican Archaeology, who organized the new glyph research. 'In today's terms, Dos Pilas was the Vietnam of the Maya world, used in a war that was actually between two superpowers.'

"A leading Maya scholar, Dr. David Webster of Pennsylvania State University, said that although he had not yet studied the staircase glyphs, 'they sound like a very exciting find.' He is the author of 'The Fall of the Ancient Maya,' published earlier this year by Thames & Hudson.

"Ever since scholars learned to decipher more and more Maya glyphs, beginning in the 1970s, they have realized that the classical Maya elite were using their advanced writing system to record narratives of their rulers, wars and celebrations. Scribes usually carved the texts on soft stones, which were then displayed as monuments in the city center or in tombs. Not having metal, they carved with pieces of hard rock.

"Before the hurricane last year, only eight steps at the base of the pyramid were known, and their inscriptions were limited. The story of war and Dos Pilas came alive when Mr. Fahsen - who is based in Guatemala City and is also an adjunct professor of archaeology at Vanderbilt - began translating the 10 other steps, those cleared by the storm.

"The steps in the center section described the first 23 years of the life of Balaj Chan K'waiil, the ruler. The glyphs even tell when he was born: Oct. 15, 625, as it would be on the modern calendar. He was brought from Tikal as a 4-year-old, and ascended to the throne of Dos Pilas in 635.

"Mr. Fahsen said the glyphs revealed that Balaj Chan K'awiil became a great warrior and for many years was loyal to Tikal, the dominant city ruled by his brother. The texts give no hint that the two brothers were enemies, as once thought by scholars.

"The stairway's east section tells the next chapter in the story. When the king was in his 20s, the other superpower, Calakmul, attacked and defeated Dos Pilas.

"This was a major surprise. Mr. Fahsen said it had not previously been established that Calakmul actually invaded and defeated Dos Pilas. Although the young king fled the city, it seems that he returned and was installed on the Dos Pilas throne as a 'puppet king,' controlled by Calakmul. Given the customs of the time, it was probably that or death.

"'Now the king displayed his loyalty to Calakmul by undertaking a decade-long war - a kind of "proxy war,' Dr. Demarest said, like some conflicts in the cold war - against Tikal. Balaj Chan K'awiil's forces sacked Tikal and captured its ruler, his own brother, to be sacrificed. This part of the story is laid out on the west section of the staircase, and the details are graphic.

"The inscriptions on the steps report that after the Dos Pilas victory over Tikal, 'Blood flowed and skulls of the 13 peoples of the Tikal place were piled up.'

"Then the glyphs record that late in his life, the Dos Pilas king did a 'victory dance' with Calakmul's king, his ally. The inscription on that final step ended with a domestic note, the ruler recording the name of his wife, Ix Itzan Ajaw, and their child, his heir.

"Dr. Demarest and other scholars said the translations supported a concept advanced by two Maya scholars, Dr. Simon Martin of University College, London, and Dr. Nikolai Grube of the University of Bonn. They contend that the turmoil of the seventh and eighth centuries resulted from the contest between the Tikal and Calakmul superpowers, along with their blocs of allied city-states, for complete dominance.

"'This didn't happen,' Dr. Demarest said. 'Instead, the giant war went back and forth. After Tikal was sacked, it eventually roared back and crushed Calakmul. And then the Maya world just broke up into regional powers, setting the stage for a period of intensive, petty warfare that finally led to the collapse of the Maya.'

"Dos Pilas itself was abandoned in 760."

The Face (and Soul) of Africa

In The New York Times on September 20, Holland Cotter reviewed an exhibit featuring African masks. The story was called "The Face (and Soul) of Africa."

"As of today," Cotter began, "the Museum for African Art, formerly of SoHo, officially makes the leap to Long Island City, Queens. And it does so with a very beautiful show titled 'Facing the Mask,' which happens to be all about moving.

"Some of the moving is physical, as in dancing, spinning, flying, dashing, chasing, gliding. Some is psychological and spiritual: the halting walk between childhood and adulthood, the long dive from life to death, the hip-hop pas de deux of human and divine. Whatever the form, one thing is sure: the goal is transport, in every meaning of that word.

"For the museum itself, as for the Museum of Modern Art a few blocks away, the relocation is temporary. A permanent home on upper Fifth Avenue is supposed to be ready within four years or so. But four years being a serious chunk of time, the museum has reconstituted on one floor of a converted Queens factory (the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum is temporarily in the same building) more or less what it had on two floors in SoHo: galleries, offices, a lecture room and a bookstore, all cleanly designed by Sunil Bald and Yolande Daniels of Sumo.

"'Facing the Mask' gets the new era off to a beguiling start with a bracingly paced, surveyish look at a large and to some extent familiar subject. More than 70 masks from sub-Saharan Africa have been assembled. And while together they represent some quintessential notion of African form, their stylistic and conceptual range is astonishing, as four masks placed at the opening of the show make clear.

"A crest mask (meant to be worn on top of the head) from the Cross River Region, on the border of Nigeria and Cameroon, has naturalistic features, leather skin and an apparently extroverted personality with its alert eyes and wide-open mouth, it seems ready to voice an opinion or two. A Guro face mask from Ivory Coast has the opposite demeanor. Its pursed lips, closed eyes and harmoniously balanced features distinguish it as a human physical ideal and an emblem of social probity.

"Another Ivory Coast mask is designed with a funny perceptual twitch or stammer, like a moving face blurred in a photograph. At first glance, it seems to have two mouths and no nose then you realize that the top mouth may be the nose. The being depicted could be human, animal or something entirely other. And something entirely other best describes a majestic face mask from the Igbo people of Nigeria. With its interlocked panels of openwork carving daubed with ocher and white paint, it is all but abstract and might have been valued simply for its inventive glamour.

"In addition to stylistic breadth, there's the matter of size. A miniature double mask made by the Lega peoples in the Democratic Republic of Congo is as small and thin as a sliced English muffin, while a helmet mask from Gabon in an adjoining vitrine has the heft and shape of a barrel. Actually, none of these is, strictly speaking, a mask at all. A real mask is a total multimedia ensemble, which includes not only the head component but also body-concealing costumes and any number of accessory objects.

"At their most extravagant, masks can be works of tremendous material bulk. In one recreated for the show, a face mask from Angola is almost buried within a haystack-shaped cloak of dried banana leaves to produce a sculptural mass as large as a parade float. In fact, some of the ethnic parades of New York City - the West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn comes to mind - have much in common with masquerades, including outrageous costumes, pulsating music and virtuosic dancing. (Wait till you see some of the show's videos of African masks in action, with their awe-inspiring choreography of midair flips and spinning on stilts.)

"Like parades, some masquerades are community-binding entertainment. Others have closely scripted, often scrupulously guarded ethical or religious agendas. They're responses to events that can cause social and personal instability: crime, war, disease, the tricky move into adulthood, the dangerous, vulnerable period when the living become the dead.

"In dealing with such matters, masquerades are like spiritual power generators, fueled with the piped-in energies of deities and ancestors. And the individual masks, in which costume and performer are one thing, become moral forces on the move, tracking down evil, settling feuds, instructing youths and restoring social order, sometimes through theatrical acts of psychic intimidation.

"The question of exactly how and why masks work is a topic of continuing scholarly debate. Indeed, as a field, African art history - and this should be true of all art histories - exists in a state of perpetual revision the research database never shuts down. This is one of the things that make the field so exciting. It also obliges every new exhibition to acknowledge, if not actively advance, fresh ideas. 'Facing the Mask,' organized by Frank Herreman, deputy director for exhibitions and publications at the museum, does so, to some degree.

"Once upon a time in the West, all African masks fell into one stylistic category: primitive. Later, they were sorted out by ethnic group, one style per group, as if each group were a sealed biosphere. Now it's obvious that the real story is one of overlap and exchange, of healthy impurity, with neighbors borrowing from one another, changing what they borrow, then altering the altered version, to further or differently enhance its value or just because change feels good.

"This process-oriented model makes history look pretty messy, which it is, and which Mr. Herreman allows it to be in a revelatory display of Dan and We masks from Ivory Coast halfway through the show.

"The two groups share cultural similarities but have utterly different mask styles, the Dan favoring a suavely polished minimalism, the We going for a bristling, large-featured expressivity. At some point, Dan carvers, maybe to jazz up their work, started to experiment with We styles we see them doing so in a lineup of 11 masks in the show. On the far right is a classic Dan example on the far left, one from the We. In between come all manner of hybrid variations and combinations of the two. No wonder scholars hesitate before identifying a mask by style alone.

"Nor are function and meaning self-evident. True, a mask from Gabon, with a heart-shaped face and faultless coiffure, really looks like what it's supposed to be: the incarnated spirit of a much admired woman who died. But it seems unlikely that anyone would guess, on sight, that a fantastic Senufo helmet mask with the composite features of a crocodile and an antelope was designed as a law-enforcement device, or that an elephant mask with snazzy black-and-white beadwork and pinwheel ears showed up mainly at funerals.

"And what about masks that changed function without changing form? A Pende mask from the Democratic Repubic of Congo with a hatchet chin and a beetling brow personified the role of executioner and wielded that most cutting of weapons, fear. But after the Pende were defeated by Belgian colonialists, they viewed their masks through disillusioned eyes. This one was demoted to a career in popular entertainment.

"'Facing the Mask' packs in a good amount of such tantalizing information. But I would not want all exhibitions, particularly at this museum, with its history of ground-breaking innovation, to take so generalist an approach to a subject that begs to be given focused study. The show is being advertised as visitor-friendly, which can be good or bad but leaves me asking questions. Is art friendly? And how friendly should it be made to seem when it is - and this is true of all art - manipulative, aggressive and secretive, or when it is as intellectually challenging and confounding as African art can be?

"There was, after all, a reason Picasso turned to African masks for his 'Desmoiselles d'Avignon.' He was out to rattle chandeliers, to shake art up, to blow those complacent European minds. With the assistance of Africa he did so, in an unasked-for homage to this continent that demonstrated, you might say, the upside of exoticism.

"Anyway, it's great that very painting is hanging at MoMA QNS, a short walk away from 'Facing the Mask.' Talk about transformative interaction: historically speaking, these two museums were born to be neighbors, and now, for a while, they will be. More important, though, there are intriguing-sounding shows ahead at the Museum for African Art itself.

One titled 'Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora,' scheduled for a year from now, will include artists living outside Africa and addressing the idea of Africanness in their work, a subject raised but not directly addressed by 'The Short Century' at P.S. 1 last spring. A second show, promised for fall 2004, will look at cultural exchanges between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, and presumably touch on the spread of Islam through the continent.

"Finally, the museum, founded as a non-collecting institution, has begun to acquire art. Its present holdings are minute but choice, as is evident in 'Recent Acquisitions,' eight pieces now on view, including a classic Chi-Wara crest mask and an ancestor figure, as slender as a sapling, from the Mboye people of Nigeria. This is superlative material, the kind that shows can be molded around in the future.

Meanwhile, in the present, there is 'Facing the Mask,' and it offers much to love. You walk into the gallery, you look around, you listen, your metabolism shifts gears, you're pulled in and you're lifted up. There's no other way to describe the art of Africa. It's tough, elusive and rapturous, and it's always saving the next dance for you."

Artifacts Dealer Facing Trial Claims Entrapment: If convicted of illegally selling Indian artifacts, Santa Fe's Joshua Baer could face fine and prison

"Artifacts Dealer Facing Trial Claims Entrapment" was the headline for Pat Reed's August 18 story on Josh Baer in the Santa Fe New Mexican. "If convicted of illegally selling Indian artifacts, Santa Fe's Joshua Baer could face fine and prison," read the subheadline.

"In the spring of 1997," Reed's story began, "Hopi rangers spent four hours rummaging through the home of a Santa Fe man who collected Native American antiquities. The Hopis were looking for a prehistoric pot the tribe was using in a sting operation as well as other items of cultural interest, but they didn't find the pot.

"That raid disturbed Joshua Baer, a local dealer in Navajo blankets and other works of American Indian art. In the fall of 1997, Baer ran a two-page advertisement in American Indian Art Magazine, urging collectors and dealers to contact the senators who had sponsored the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, regarding its abuses. NAGPRA was the 1990 federal law the Hopis had used to search the collector's house. The ad also encouraged collectors to contact the heads of various American Indian tribes to ask for clarification on what constituted an item that was illegal to buy or sell.

"In January 2000, agents from the FBI, the Department of Fish & Wildlife and the National Parks Service raided Baer's gallery on Palace Avenue and confiscated several hundred items and documents as part of an investigation into his business. The search warrant served by the agents cited the Bald Eagle Protection Act and NAGPRA as two of the laws that Baer allegedly had violated. In November 2001, Baer was charged in federal court in Albuquerque with 14 counts of selling illegal eagle feathers and two counts of selling ceremonial items. Baer pled not guilty to all charges, and his trial is scheduled for Sept. 23. If convicted, he faces thousands of dollars in fines and up to 24 months in prison.

"Baer said the agents worked for months to entrap him into selling them items that were protected by NAGPRA or federal acts restricting the sale of certain bird feathers.

"'When the FBI questioned one of my ex-employees,' Baer said, 'they kept asking her how she could have worked for this scumbag. Isn't he a bad man? She answered no. ... And they said, "Well, we feel he disrespects the law. He ran that ad telling people to break the law." The ad says nothing of the kind. But that's the way it was interpreted by law enforcement.'

"Baer's ad indicated he thought Congress had passed the law to ensure federally funded institutions such as museums and colleges returned skeletal remains, grave goods and other items of cultural patrimony to tribes. In the ad, the dealer said he believed the law did not allow the Hopis - or other tribes - to seize Indian works from private homes. So he asked readers to write U. S. senators who sponsored the act to protest its abuse and to let tribes know collectors were willing to return any items that had been stolen or were illegal to own.

"Baer said in the ad he wanted to start a dialogue among Native Americans, dealers and collectors about the repatriation of such items. 'The NAGPRA law is so vague that none of us in the dealing community could figure out what it actually covered and what it did not cover,' he said in an interview last week. Efforts to reach Indian experts on NAGPRA and endangered-bird feather issues this week were unsuccessful. However, a museum curator, who asked to not be identified, said he believed it was possible to get a clear reading on what NAGPRA mandated. And, he said, the law obviously applies to dealers and private collectors as well as museums.

"'There are a set of dealers in Santa Fe that have done this (violated federal law) for years,' the curator said. 'Guys came over from the pueblos to sell this stuff to Josh. Why did they go to Josh? The fact that those guys walked up to Josh's gallery tells you something.'

"The federal government, which declined to comment on the case last week, has said in its court filings that federal agents knew nothing of Baer's ad.

"About 90 days after Baer's ad appeared, U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agent Lucinda Schroeder visited Baer's gallery in downtown Santa Fe. From that point forward, Baer and the federal government tell markedly different stories about what happened.

"Schroeder eventually enlisted the help of Robert Wittman, an FBI agent who specialized in art crimes, and Ivar Husby, who worked for a Norwegian law-enforcement agency. Baer contends the government had as many as 20 agents working on his case and possibly spent more than a $1 million before it lodged charges against him, though he says he can't prove that. Two agents stayed at La Posada, an upscale Santa Fe hotel, as part of their cover.

"Wittman told Baer he was an art consultant helping Husby, who passed himself off as a wealthy Norwegian collector, buy Native American antiquities. The two visited Baer's gallery several times in the second half of 1999 and early 2000.

"'Wittman came back a couple of extra times and raised the specter . of other clients he had who were interested in acquiring things,' Baer said. 'And there was a discussion at one point of how he was traveling all over the world, and he had all these clients, and there was going to be an exclusive arrangement whereby I would be the only person selling to (his company). I think there was some bond-building strategy whereby the FBI decided they wanted him out here on his own, so we could become better friends.'

"According to the federal government, Baer discussed selling certain objects and giving Husby 'other clearly illegal objects,' and he offered to sell - and sold - the agents prohibited artifacts.

"On Aug. 23, 1999, the government said, Wittman told Baer that Husby wanted to spend $30,000 to buy a pair of wooden parrots from Jemez Pueblo, a Navajo singer's brush, a Jemez hair tie and a pair of Navajo dreaming twins. Baer had said the parrots were 'dance wands' used in a corn dance ceremony to attract rain. According to the government, Baer said he would give Husby the hair tie, the singer's brush and the dreaming twins and prepare an invoice for the parrots for $30,000.

"The government says tape recordings show Baer told Wittman: 'What I'm saying is if (Husby's) willing to pay a premium for the objects I'm legally allowed to sell him, then I'm willing to make a gift to him of the objects that he wants.'

"Wittman and Husby returned in January 2000, the government said, and federal agents searched Baer's gallery after he and the undercover agents met to discuss the sale of a feather headdress.

"'I never sold a war bonnet to them,' Baer said, 'and I never gave it to them. ... The thing that surprises me, shocks me the most, is that no transaction ever took place. The undercover FBI agent ... asks me on tape if they can buy a war bonnet and I tell them no, it's illegal, and he says, can you give us one? And I say it's possible I could give you one if you were going to buy a huge amount of stuff. And that's the degree of the alleged sale. I never sold it to them. ... No money changed hands.'

"Among the items Baer is ultimately charged with selling are a Santo Domingo corn goddess, a Cheyenne headdress, Navajo singer's brushes, Jemez hair ties, a Navajo hair tie, Navajo dreaming twins, Navajo prayer sticks, an Acoma wooden doll, a Kiowa ghost shield, Navajo bullroarers and a Native American prayer stick.

"According to Baer's court filings, Wittman and Husby repeatedly asked the dealer to sell some "restricted" items displayed in his gallery that were not for sale, and he repeatedly refused to do so. The undercover agents then asked him to give the items to Husby as gifts.

"In his court filings, Baer's attorney, Peter Schoenburg, insists government agents in effect engineered the alleged criminal offenses they have accused Baer of committing. Schoenburg notes: 'By visiting Mr. Baer's home, encouraging his unlawful activity during a time of financial strain, insisting that their efforts were simply designed to encourage a knowledge of Native American culture, assuring Mr. Baer that his conduct was lawful, and occasionally resorting to screaming threats, the Agents effectively coerced Mr. Baer's continued participation.'

"Because of the expense involved in going to trial, Baer said he would like to arrive at a plea. 'I felt that way after the raid,' he said. 'If I have done something wrong, let's figure out a way to deal with it to everybody's satisfaction. But so far the government has insisted that these are sales that took place and they took place at specific dollar amounts. And that's so ludicrous that it makes me want to go to trial.'

"Baer said he believes the dollar amount of the items the government says he tried to sell its agents is what is important in the case. 'Dollar amounts key the sentencing guidelines. The sentencing guidelines determine whether you go to jail. So in the discussions we had ... they offered to pay more for some things. It seems to me they were trying to push the level of the discussed transactions to the point where jail time would be mandatory. That gives them some leverage in terms of getting me to plead guilty. But that's just conjecture on my part.'

"The government, Baer said, is claiming the goods he offered to sell were worth $280,000. Baer said he had those items independently appraised, and the price tag was less than $20,000."

Baer Moves Gallery to Larger Space

Another Baer-related story in The Santa Fe New Mexican by Pat Reed and published on August 18 was headlined "Baer Moves Gallery to Larger Space."

"In early July," the story began, "despite federal charges he had illegally sold prohibited Indian artifacts, art dealer Joshua Baer moved his gallery into a large new space atop La Esquina Building on Marcy Street.

"'Facing what I'm facing, how could I create something like this?' Baer asks. 'This was an opportunity. ... If I had passed on the space, it would have been chopped up into office space. I thought it was worth the risk. You don't often get the opportunity very often to have this kind of space on this scale that is this beautiful.'

"The floor - 4,000 to 4,500 square feet - is one room with a view of the Santa Fe landscape.

"Baer said it took him a long time to understand that dealing in American Indian art was an inherently racist thing to do. Suppose, he said, someone went to Alabama or Mississippi and found a bunch of black carvers or black painters and brought them to Santa Fe for a weekend and called the event Black Market. He believes many people would recognize that as a racist thing.

"'In the back of my mind, I thought that some day I would like to have a gallery where the Navajo blanket was displayed side by side with other works of art that didn't necessarily have anything to do with American Indian culture,' he said. 'I thought it would be refreshing to say to clients, "Here's a photograph that's a work of art. Here's a map that's a work of art. Here's a piece of furniture that's a work of art. And here's a Navajo blanket that's a work of art." The idea was to give each work of art equal weight, so that each piece could be considered on its own merits, not judged by its ethnic background.'

"Baer's father, Morley Baer, was a landscape photographer who died in 1995. Morley Baer's work, along with other photographers' pictures, can now be found at Joshua Baer & Co. Baer has long had an interest in maps and in Spanish colonial and antique Tibetan furniture, he said, but his old gallery on Palace Avenue was too small to display those items. Furthermore, most of his clients came there to see Navajo blankets and Pueblo pottery.

"'The new space,' he said, 'represents an attempt to show Navajo blankets with other works of art and to try somehow to get away from the characterization of our business as an Indian art gallery. It also represents an attempt on my part to be an art dealer who specializes in Navajo blankets as opposed to an American Indian art dealer.' "

Artifacts Dealer Josh Baer Pleads Guilty to Illegal Trading

A follow-up Baer story in The New Mexican, "Artifacts Dealer Pleads Guilty to Illegal Trading," was written by Geoff Grammer and published in the Business Section on September 11.

Datelined Albuquerque, Grammer's story began "A Santa Fe Indian artifacts dealer pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges he illegally traded eagle feathers and various other Native American cultural items, but a federal judge said he probably won't sentence the man to jail time.

"Joshua Baer admitted to six charges of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and three charges of violating the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act - crimes that occurred during a two-year undercover operation conducted by the FBI and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Department.

"The operation included Ivar Husby, a Norwegian law-enforcement officer, who told Baer he was a millionaire collector from Europe, and FBI agent Robert Wittmen, who posed as an art broker from Philadelphia. The two had numerous encounters with Baer and recorded him discussing the sale of several prohibited artifacts.

"Each year, an estimated $25 million in artifacts is sold in Santa Fe, commonly recognized as the center for Indian antiquity trading.

"Baer, who owns a gallery in the La Esquina Building on Marcy Street, has estimated the government's operation against him - including airfare, hotel costs, purchases, etc. - cost more $1 million, a claim the government has not verified.

"Included in the prohibited artifacts, according to Baer's federal indictment, were numerous items 'having ongoing historical, traditional and cultural importance' to several Indian tribes and other items that contained feathers of the golden eagle, a bird protected by the MBTA.

"Baer, who declined comment after Tuesday's hearing, has said in the past he believes the government entrapped him into selling the items.

"'He was heavily encouraged by federal agents to do something that is very out of character for him,' said Peter Schoenberg, Baer's defense attorney. 'But I wouldn't say entrapment is necessarily the right word.'

"Though Baer's guilty plea means the Santa Fe gallery owner could face thousands of dollars in fines and up to two years in prison, U. S. District Judge John Conway said Tuesday he believes the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is vague, although not unconstitutionally so, and told Baer he will probably not be incarcerated for his crimes.

"'This is not my favorite statute,' Conway said. 'So I'm not going to put him in jail.'

"Conway ordered Baer to undergo a presentence report by the U. S. Probation Office and said his sentencing date would occur in roughly 75 days.

"As part of the plea agreement, the government, which was represented by Assistant U. S. Attorney Mary Catherine McCulloch, dropped eight charges against Baer.

"A second Santa Fe man, Thomas Cavaliere, also pleaded guilty Tuesday in Albuquerque before U. S. Magistrate Lorenzo Garcia, to similar charges.

"Although specific details of Cavaliere's crimes were not available Tuesday, court records indicate he violated NAGPRA four times in Santa Fe and Albuquerque between June 1998 and January 2000. Court records also indicate he violated MBTA four times in Santa Fe in October and November of 1999.

"Cavaliere faces up to two years in jail. A date for his sentencing was not set Tuesday."

Northwest Indian tribes have won the right to appeal the Kennewick Man ruling that allows the ancient bones to be studied by scientists

October 23 Kennewick Man Update: Northwest Indian tribes have won the right to appeal the Kennewick Man ruling that allows the ancient bones to be studied by scientists. Mike Lee's story was headlined "NW tribes announce Kennewick Man appeal."

"Northwest American Indians will appeal a federal district court ruling that allowed for private study of ancient bones known as Kennewick Man, hoping to defend Indian remains across the nation," Lee's story began.

"A lawyer for the Nez Perce Tribe on Tuesday announced intentions to appeal before the Oct. 29 deadline, igniting what likely will be at least two more years of legal wrangling in the high-profile case.

"'This is just the beginning of a long appeal road,' Nez Perce attorney Rob Roy Smith said of a case that many expect will end up before the U. S. Supreme Court. 'We are committed to getting a successful resolution.'

"He said a coalition of four Northwest tribes has received support from Indians across the country who are eager to defend the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, commonly known as NAGPRA.

"'NAGPRA is the strongest federal law that the tribes have to protect cultural resources, and we want to make sure that the tribal rights and tribal resources are fully protected,' Smith said.

"U. S. Magistrate Judge John Jelderks told tribal lawyers Monday afternoon that they could appeal to the 9th Circuit Court even though they were not parties in the initial lawsuit over the 9,000-year-old remains found in Kennewick more than six years ago.

"Colville, Yakama, Umatilla and Nez Perce lawyers asked in September for the right to appeal on the grounds that 'it is uncertain whether the federal defendants are capable and willing to raise the same issues.'

"A month earlier, Jelderks ruled the federal government erred in planning to give the bones to tribes because, he said, the remains had not been clearly linked to modern tribes as required by NAGPRA.

"Instead, he sided with a group of eight prominent scientists who sued to stop the government from giving the bones to tribes without study.

"Earlier this month, scientists submitted study plans to the government. However, the imminent appeal means additional study is likely years away - if it ever happens.

"Federal lawyers have not announced whether they also will defend decisions made by the Department of the Interior, but they haven't opposed the tribal appeal.

"'We are very thankful that Judge Jelderks recognized the tribes need to be involved in the litigation as full parties and to protect our rights,' Smith said, adding that Nez Perce leaders committed to an appeal the day after Jelderks' decision.

"He said success would be getting the San Francisco-based court to direct the government to give the ancient remains to American Indians for reburial.

"The pivotal aspect of the case remains the government's determination that human remains from before the European discovery of the New World are legally Native American.

"Tribal leaders support the government's view, which Jelderks said was without merit. 'If we can fight for the proper interpretation of (NAGPRA), then all of Indian country will benefit from this case,' Smith said.

"It's not clear whether the case will be heard in Seattle, Portland or San Francisco. Regardless, the court has wide discretion in how it handles an appeal. It could simply and quickly affirm Jelderks' 73-page ruling, or it could write a substantially new decision that overrules significant sections.

"Alan Schneider, lawyer for the scientists, opposed a tribal appeal. However, he acknowledged Tuesday that history will find it important to have all viewpoints presented completely in a court record that is already several thousand pages.

"He remains confident that Jelderks' ruling will stand, especially now that the burden is on the tribes rather than on the scientists.

"'The tribes are going to have a difficult time convincing the 9th Circuit that this trial court that saw the case for six full years is so wrong they should reverse his ruling,' Schneider said.

"And, he added, the tribes are 'running a major risk here of converting what otherwise would be a local decision into a precedent ... that will become law for the entire 9th Circuit.' "

Don't Blame Columbus for All the Indians' Ills

"Don't Blame Columbus for All the Indians' Ills" read the headline for John Noble Wilford's October 29 story in The New York Times.

"Europeans first came to the Western Hemisphere armed with guns, the cross and, unknowingly, pathogens," wrote Wilford. "Against the alien agents of disease, the indigenous people never had a chance. Their immune systems were unprepared to fight smallpox and measles, malaria and yellow fever.

"The epidemics that resulted have been well documented. What had not been clearly recognized until now, though, is that the general health of Native Americans had apparently been deteriorating for centuries before 1492.

"That is the conclusion of a team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists who have completed a wide-ranging study of the health of people living in the Western Hemisphere in the last 7,000 years.

"The researchers, whose work is regarded as the most comprehensive yet, say their findings in no way diminish the dreadful impact Old World diseases had on the people of the New World. But it suggests that the New World was hardly a healthful Eden.

"More than 12,500 skeletons from 65 sites in North and South America - slightly more than half of them from pre-Columbians - were analyzed for evidence of infections, malnutrition and other health problems in various social and geographical settings.

"The researchers used standardized criteria to rate the incidence and degree of these health factors by time and geography. Some trends leapt out from the resulting index. The healthiest sites for Native Americans were typically the oldest sites, predating Columbus by more than 1,000 years. Then came a marked decline.

"'Our research shows that health was on a downward trajectory long before Columbus arrived,' Dr. Richard H. Steckel and Dr. Jerome C. Rose, study leaders, wrote in 'The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere,' a book they edited. It was published in August.

"Dr. Steckel, an economist and anthropologist at Ohio State University, and Dr. Rose, an anthropologist at the University of Arkansas, stressed in interviews that their findings in no way mitigated the responsibility of Europeans as bearers of disease devastating to native societies. Yet the research, they said, should correct a widely held misperception that the New World was virtually free of disease before 1492.

"In an epilogue to the book, Dr. Philip D. Curtin, an emeritus professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, said the skeletal evidence of the physical well-being of pre-Columbians 'shows conclusively that however much it may have deteriorated on contact with the outer world, it was far from paradisiacal before the Europeans and Africans arrived.'

"About 50 scientists and scholars joined in the research and contributed chapters to the book. One of them, Dr. George J. Armelagos of Emory University, a pioneer in the field of paleopathology, said in an interview that the research provided an 'evolutionary history of disease in the New World.'

"The surprise, Dr. Armelagos said, was not the evidence of many infectious diseases, but that the pre-Columbians were not better nourished and in general healthier.

"Others said the research, supported by the National Science Foundation and Ohio State, would be the talk of scholarly seminars for years to come and the foundation for more detailed investigations of pre-Columbian health. Dr. Steckel is considering conducting a similar study of health patterns well into European prehistory.

"'Although some of the authors occasionally appear to overstate the strength of the case they can make, they are also careful to indicate the limitations of the evidence,' Dr. Curtin wrote of the Steckel-Rose research. 'They recognize that skeletal material is the best comparative evidence we have for the human condition over such a long period of time, but it is not perfect.'

"The research team gathered evidence on seven basic indicators of chronic physical conditions that can be detected in skeletons - namely, degenerative joint disease, dental health, stature, anemia, arrested tissue development, infections and trauma from injuries. Dr. Steckel and Dr. Rose called this 'by far the largest comparable data set of this type ever created.'

"The researchers attributed the widespread decline in health in large part to the rise of agriculture and urban living. People in South and Central America began domesticating crops more than 5,000 years ago, and the rise of cities there began more than 2,000 years ago.

"These were mixed blessings. Farming tended to limit the diversity of diets, and the congestion of towns and cities contributed to the rapid spread of disease. In the widening inequalities of urban societies, hard work on low-protein diets left most people vulnerable to illness and early death.

"Similar signs of deleterious health effects have been found in the ancient Middle East, where agriculture started some 10,000 years ago. But the health consequences of farming and urbanism, Dr. Rose said, appeared to have been more abrupt in the New World.

"The more mobile, less densely settled populations were usually the healthiest pre-Columbians. They were taller and had fewer signs of infectious lesions in their bones than residents of large settlements. Their diet was sufficiently rich and varied, the researchers said, for them to largely avoid the symptoms of childhood deprivation, like stunting and anemia. Even so, in the simplest hunter-gatherer societies, few people survived past age 50. In the healthiest cultures in the 1,000 years before Columbus, a life span of no more than 35 years might be usual.

"In examining the skeletal evidence, paleopathologists rated the healthiest pre-Columbians to be people living 1,200 years ago on the coast of Brazil, where they had access to ample food from land and sea. Their relative isolation protected them from most infectious diseases.

"Conditions also must have been salubrious along the coasts of South Carolina and Southern California, as well as among the farming and hunting societies in what is now the Midwest. Indian groups occupied the top 14 spots of the health index, and 11 of these sites predate the arrival of Europeans.

"The least healthy people in the study were from the urban cultures of Mexico and Central America, notably where the Maya civilization flourished presumably at great cost to life and limb, and the Zuni of New Mexico. The Zuni lived at a 400-year-old site, Hawikku, a crowded, drought-prone farming pueblo that presumably met its demise before European settlers made contact.

"It was their hard lot, Dr. Rose said, to be farmers 'on the boundaries of sustainable environments.'

"'Pre-Columbian populations were among the healthiest and the least healthy in our sample,' Dr. Steckel and Dr. Rose said. 'While pre-Columbian natives may have lived in a disease environment substantially different from that in other parts of the globe, the original inhabitants also brought with them, or evolved with, enough pathogens to create chronic conditions of ill health under conditions of systematic agriculture and urban living.'

"In recent examinations of 1,000-year-old Peruvian mummies, for example, paleopathologists discovered clear traces of tuberculosis in their lungs, more evidence that native Americans might already have been infected with some of the diseases that were thought to have been brought to the New World by European explorers.

"Tuberculosis bears another message: as an opportunistic disease, it strikes when times are tough, often overwhelming the bodies of people already weakened by malnutrition, poor sanitation in urban centers and debilitated immune systems.

"The Steckel-Rose research extended the survey to the health consequences of the first contacts with American Indians by Europeans and Africans and the health of European-Americans and African-Americans up to the early 20th century.

"Not surprisingly, African-American slaves were near the bottom of the health index. An examination of plantation slaves buried in South Carolina, Dr. Steckel said, revealed that their poor health compared to that of 'pre-Columbian Indian populations threatened with extinction.'

"On the other hand, blacks buried at Philadelphia's African Church in the 1800s were in the top half of the health index. Their general conditions were apparently superior to those of small-town, middle-class whites, Dr. Steckel said.

"The researchers found one exception to the rule that the healthiest sites for Native Americans were the oldest sites. Equestrian nomads of the Great Plains of North America in the 19th century seemed to enjoy excellent health, near the top of the index. They were not fenced in to farms or cities.

"In a concluding chapter of their book, Dr. Steckel and Dr. Rose said the study showed that 'the health decline was precipitous with the changes in ecological environments where people lived.' It is not a new idea in anthropology, they conceded, 'but scholars in general have yet to absorb it.' "

Niger Delta Art, Riches of a Plundered Land: some of sub-Saharan Africa's most spectacular art

Holland Cotter writes about African Art again on November 25 in The New York Times. In "Niger Delta Art, Riches of a Plundered Land," Cotter says that the art of the Niger region, "some of sub-Saharan Africa's most spectacular art," was on exhibit in Los Angeles in November.

"For 40 years," Cotter's story began, "international fuel companies have mercilessly polluted the oil-rich Niger Delta in West Africa, where the Niger River fans out into a network of smaller rivers and streams on its way to the sea. This area of natural beauty is an ecological disaster. Many of its residents - traditionally fishermen, traders and farmers - lack basic necessities like clean drinking water. Edible fish has to be imported.

"The same region produces some of sub-Saharan Africa's most spectacular art: fabulous sculptures, acrobatic masquerades and elaborate aquatic pageants, with boats as ornately festooned as Rose Bowl floats. These regattas are staged on rivers believed to be the home of water spirits that have the potential to secure communal well-being.

"So the modern story of the Delta and its multiethnic culture is intensely conflicted. It is a story of abundance and scarcity catastrophe and beauty defeat and resilience. Can a museum exhibition capture such contradictions? Not easily. The required combination of anthropological savvy, advocacy politics and sheer visual allure is beyond the scope, or the interest, of most mainstream institutions. But the U.C.L.A. Fowler Museum of Cultural History gets the balance amazingly right in "Ways of the Rivers: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta' (through Nov. 17).

"Organized by Martha G. Anderson, professor of art history at Alfred University, and Philip M. Peek, professor of anthropology at Drew University, the show begins underwater. Or at least that's the effect of a twilight-dim installation in which two sharks and a ghostly sawfish appear to swim. They are, in fact, carved wooden headpieces worn by performers in masquerades. And for Delta residents, the sight of them sweeping through villages evokes a subaqueous theater in which humans and spirits temporarily meet.

"These sculptures also suggest one of the show's basic questions: to what degree is art formed by where it is made? Theories of environmental determinism that at their most simplistic equated primitive art with jungle origins have long been discredited. Yet the show suggests that environment can indeed play a role in shaping how a cultural group in a particular setting defines itself visually.

"The environment considered in 'Ways of the River' is an immense piece of African geography encompassing many ethnic groups. Some differences between them - language, belief systems - are ancient. Others are the results of European colonial rule, which broke populations up into governable units, a divide-and-conquer strategy, leaving neighbors fighting among themselves for dwindling resources.

"Despite these natural and unnatural divisions, many of the Delta's populations produce art that seems, to some degree, to reflect a common experience of place and shared elements of cultural history. Broadly speaking, the shared forms represent two social ideals, one maternal, the other martial.

"The nurturing, maternal ideal is embodied in what Ms. Anderson and Mr. Peek call a 'water ethos,' expressed by images of fish, boats, snakes, mother goddesses. They belong to the realm of oceans and streams, rains and tides, and carry traditional female associations of fertility and auspiciousness. Equally widespread is a warrior ethos. Usually associated with males, it finds a voice in larger-than-life-size sculptures of fierce-looking forest spirits, whose multiple heads speak of omniscient power. Such spirits inspire (and in some cases control) aggression, and demand blood sacrifice.

"But these categories are not mutually exclusive. Women sometimes go to war water spirits portrayed in masquerades can be hostile and frightening. The boats seen in the great ceremonial regattas originated as war canoes, and these festive celebrations are also competitive boating meets.

"Other aspects of Delta art also suggest that it represents, for all its variety, a larger communal response to specific geographic and historical circumstances. By the time Europeans arrived in the 15th century, the region had already developed a tradition of water-borne trading within the Delta. European colonists - first Portuguese, then British - took advantage of this, using Delta residents as middlemen in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and, later, the palm-oil trade.

"Some Delta groups grew rich, a development that may have encouraged an already existing tendency to conceive of gods and spirits as species of beneficent foreigners. Bush spirit sculptures have European top hats, and Delta rulers adapted these and other elements of British formal wear as part of their official regalia. One of several large-scale installations in the show recreates the setting for a Delta funeral, in which a corpse is displayed on a succession of beds, each covered with expensive imported textiles, including Indian velvets and silks acquired through trade with England. "Such a display attests to not only the high status of the deceased, but also to the urbane character of Niger Delta culture. The construction of a striking Kalabari ancestral screen indicates knowledge of European joinery techniques and, with its frontally arranged figures, the possible influence of photography. A magnificent carved-in-the-round ancestor figure was very likely inspired by both Benin royal portraiture and European ship figureheads.

"Cultural forms have traveled in the other direction as well. Delta textiles found their way to Europe, as did ornately carved, openwork wooden oars made to be sold as souvenirs. Some contemporary Delta-born artists exhibit internationally. One, Bruce Onobrakpeya, who was in the last Venice Biennale, has contributed a splendid shrinelike piece to the Fowler exhibition. Another, Sokari Douglas Camp, now living in London, creates life-size kinetic sculptures based on Kalabari masquerades. One such figure wears a version of the sawfish headpiece that opens the exhibition.

"The Fowler, under the direction of Marla C. Berns and the curatorial supervision of Polly Nooter Roberts, is renowned for interdisciplinary exhibitions. Its 'Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou,' which came to the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1998, was one of the great exhibitions of the late 1990s. 'Ways of the Rivers' is further proof that the museum's reputation is well founded. The Museum for African Art in New York, where Ms. Roberts once worked, has also produced challenging shows, though the inaugural offering at its new home in Queens, while beautiful, is not in this venturesome league.

"But as a rule, the study and exhibition of art from Africa seem to invite outside-the-box thinking. Certainly no field has been bolder in breaking the rules of what museum shows can say, and how. But do such departures from the standard notion of exhibition-as-window-shopping place an art already held at arm's length in the West even further from a popular audience?

"I don't think so. Shows like 'Ways of the Rivers' can make more conventional presentations feel static and tepid, restricted to a single criterion for what art should be, i.e., beautiful. The art of Africa is beautiful beyond defining. But it is also an active agent that mirrors life and potentially transforms it. This is true of all art, though only exhibitions of African art seem routinely willing to make this point.

"It is forcefully made by the Fowler show and its catalog, a densely layered and enthralling book. An exhibition photograph of an oil fire burning out of control in the Delta documents a place and a people under assault. The forms of water spirits swimming through the galleries speak of cultural and spiritual persistence. Together these very different kinds of images create a museum environment that reflects reality and helps change your view of what art is and can be."

Maya Sculpture in Baltimore

"Maya Sculpture in Baltimore" is a brief New York Times description of a show that also features Olmec carving. The story-ette was written by Eric P. Nash and ran on November 3.

"The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is presenting 'Art of the Ancient Americas,' a collection of more than 120 objects, ranging from 4,000-year-old ceramic figures from the Valdivia culture, which existed in what is now Ecuador, to Aztec and Inca sculptures from the 16th century.

"Many of the pieces will be seen by the public for the first time in the exhibition, which is on a 10-year loan from the Austen-Stokes Ancient Americas Foundation, in Upper Nyack, N.Y.

"Objects from all of the major Mesoamerican cultures will be presented, including Olmec, Maya and Teotihuacán. Other highlights include larger ceramic sculptures from West Mexico, intricate goldwork from Colombia and works from the Caribbean and Alaska.

"The show is organized by culture and arranged chronologically, from 2500 B.C. to A.D. 1520. Little is known about some of the more ancient cultures like the Valdivia, but the works involve a core set of themes from agricultural fertility, the role of the leader as the link between the realms of the natural and supernatural and shamanic practices.

"Olmec culture, which flourished from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 600 in what are now the Mexican states of Tabasco and Veracruz, is well represented with a jaguar-mask pendant and a kneeling jaguar figure carved in greenstone, dating from 900 to 600 B.C.

"Maya pieces include a stucco head in profile and a dancing figure from the necropolis of Jaina. Both date from A.D. 600 to 900. At its peak, about A.D. 250, the Maya empire extended through present-day Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras.

"The museum, at 600 North Charles Street near Mount Vernon Square, is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. general admission, $8. Information, (410) 547-9000 or www.thewalters.org."

A Bronx Library's Peculiar Catch-22

"A Bronx Library's Peculiar Catch-22" was the headline for Leslie Eaton's November 18 story in The New York Times on the Heye Collection's book collection.

"Slightly more than 70 years ago," Eaton wrote, "Archer M. Huntington may have made a dreadful mistake.

"If so, it was made - as many such mistakes are - with the best of motives, among them the desire to honor his stepfather."

"The decision Mr. Huntington made, around 1930, was to have the Bronx library founded by his stepfather take in an extensive collection of books and manuscripts amassed by George Gustav Heye, the founder of the Museum of the American Indian. Mr. Heye's collection of rare materials about Indians had piled up in the basement of the museum at 155th and Broadway, and Mr. Huntington was one of the museum's major benefactors.

"Whether Mr. Huntington's decision truly turned out to be an awful mistake depends on your point of view. But nobody can deny that in recent years it has led to a series of legal disputes of Dickensian proportions, involving the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, the State attorney general and rafts of private lawyers.

"Nobody can deny that the likely outcome of all that litigation will be the demise of a quaint and quirky patch of the Bronx known as the Huntington Free Library and Reading Room on Westchester Square. Whether that is a bad thing depends, again, on your point of view.

"For Catherine McChesney, the Huntington's librarian, the death of the library would clearly be a bad thing, and not only because her mother would have to move out of the apartment over the reading room that she has occupied for three decades.

"Ms. McChesney said she thought that if Archer Huntington had known what was going to happen, he himself might have had second thoughts.

"'If he could go back, I don't know what he'd do,' she said.

"The library was founded in the late 19th century by Collis P. Huntington, the railroad magnate, and his second wife, Arabella, the mother of Archer Huntington. According to the minutes of the museum's board of trustees, Archer Huntington, realizing that the reading room was a 'memorial to his illustrious father' and 'desiring to expand its usefulness and importance,' decided that the museum would donate the books to the library and the library would build a special addition (still known as the 'new' building) to house them.

"Archer Huntington would pay for the whole enterprise by donating valuable real estate and a quarter of a million dollars - serious money, especially in the year after the great stock market crash.

"The library itself was a rather old-fashioned place, even by the standards of 1930. The red brick Gothic-style building was constructed between 1882 and 1890, when the village of West Chester was a pastoral place and Collis Huntington had a summer home nearby.

"The aim of Collis Huntington was to provide a place 'where all persons without distinction of race or creed may assemble for purposes of reading, study, education and self-improvement, and for lectures, exhibitions, instruction and amusement,' according to the legal documents involved in setting up the library trust.

"In other words, it was to be an alternative to taverns, as was made clear in some of the speeches made when the library opened in 1891. In addition to reading, patrons could play billiards or a hand of whist to amuse themselves.

"At the time, the library apparently was welcomed. 'Last Saturday evening, Oct. 7, 1891, was a red-letter epoch in the history of Westchester,' said a souvenir program printed afterward to mark the opening. Illustrious visitors to the library included Booker T. Washington, who signed the guest book in 1892 and 1894.

"But the rise of circulating libraries, which allowed people to actually take books home, dimmed the appeal of the Huntington, especially after a branch of the New York Public Library opened across the street in 1937.

"So the Huntington turned most of its attention to its American Indian holdings, spending millions of dollars to care for and expand the collection, which has doubled in size.

"The reading room received the occasional new book, often to expand its collection of 'Bronxiana.' But for the most part, its 7,100 or so volumes consist of the collected works of every three-named 19th-century writer imaginable, from Louisa May Alcott and James Fenimore Cooper to William Makepeace Thackeray and Henry David Thoreau.

"Because the library never got rid of any books, it still has many that are a tad out of date, including 'Pre-Historic Times,' by Sir John Lubbock, Bart. (the 1890 edition), and 'Sex Equality: A Solution of the Woman Problem,' by Emmet Densmore, M.D., published in 1909.

"A number of the reading room books are first editions published around the turn of the century, said Mary B. Davis, an expert on American Indian culture who for many years was the director of the library. 'I don't know that the neighborhood is entranced by that,' she said, 'but they do use the Bronx collections.'

"So things continued, very quietly, until about 1989. The Indian museum, which had run low on space at 155th Street and low on money in the decades since it was founded in 1916, ended up becoming a part of the Smithsonian.

"The Smithsonian assumed that the books at the Huntington were part of the deal. The library's trustees disagreed. Negotiations between the two sides broke down.

"The trustees believed they were abiding by the trusts the Huntingtons had established, said Edward A. Morgan, the lawyer who has been president of the board for many years. 'Turning over the books to the Smithsonian without so much as a thank-you note' was not the idea they had in mind, Mr. Morgan said.

"And so the litigation began. At the end of Phase 1, in 1994, a judicial decision said the library did not have to give the books to the Smithsonian, which, to this day, disagrees.

"But, Mr. Morgan said, the costs of the lawsuit put the library in financial peril. Meanwhile, the buildings were decaying, especially the oldest one. Water seeped through the walls around the arched front door plaster fell from the ceiling in the stacks off of the reading room. Both grand clocks in the room stopped, and the library could not afford to have them fixed, said Ms. McChesney, whose father had been the library's caretaker. (Before she married, Ms. McChesney lived with her family in the upstairs apartment still occupied by her mother.)

"Not that there are many people to notice the deterioration. The Indian collection draws some visitors, but on many days the library draws only a handful of people, mainly children who come by to do homework, Ms. McChesney said.

"Indeed, things were so quiet that a couple of years ago the attorney general's office said the library was basically dormant. Its assets, including the landmark building and its garden of mulberries and horse chestnuts, should be distributed to other institutions, said the office, which has jurisdiction over trusts.

"But eventually the attorney general agreed to the library's plan to turn the Indian collection over to another institution, like the New York Historical Association in Cooperstown, for $2.5 million. The library would use that money - less, it says, than the collection is worth - to try to turn itself into a community center, along the lines of Collis Huntington's original plan.

"After the Smithsonian objected, the whole thing ended up in court again. Last month, Acting Justice Stanley Green of the State Supreme Court decided that the plan was improper. Any money paid for the Indian collection must be used to benefit the collection, he ruled, not to bail out the library.

"What happens next is unclear. The parties will go back before Justice Green on Nov. 26. The library is trying to decide whether to appeal, Mr. Morgan said.

"'Adding the Indian collection was designed to help the library,' he said, 'not to hurt it.'

"Ms. Davis, the former director of the library, said she did not agree that Archer Huntington had made a mistake, exactly. 'Archer did what he needed to do at the time,' she said. 'Things just don't last forever.' "

A Show Bursting Out: another Holland Cotter story on African art

"A Show Bursting Out, another Holland Cotter story on African art, was in The New York Times on November 22.

"Scheduling shows at the Metropolitan Museum is like regulating airline takeoffs at Thanksgiving," the story began. "The queue is long establishing priorities is a delicate business the competition for prime runway space is fierce.

"The museum's curators of African art have sidestepped all the fuss in 'Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture.' Rather than wait for one of the deluxe showcase galleries to be free, they've cleared out a piece of their home turf, the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, and mounted the splendid if compact show there.

"Even with Daniel Kershaw's ingeniously permeable installation, the space feels small for so large an art. But I always feel this way about African art in museums to me it looks uncontainable, irrepressible, pressurized to the point of explosion. The impression comes from the physicality of work that is constantly reaching out and pulling in, opening and closing, contrasting light and dark, rough and smooth. It is also a product of conceptual activity that is practical, radical and nonstop.

"The art in the Met's show, from more than a dozen African cultures, does these things:

- It proposes rigorously ethical models for political leadership and a universal etiquette of patience and self-restraint.

- It promotes physical and psychological healing and establishes diplomatic ties with the afterlife.

- For the average person, it shapes a stimulating vision of the here and now by inventing forms that don't exist and reflecting forms that do, so that everyday life feels both exotic and reassuringly familiar.

- Through an exercise of immense wit - no art is more entertaining - and moral gravity, it records history, the record of where we came from and where we may be going.

"History is the theme of the show, which has been organized by Alisa LaGamma, an associate curator at the museum. Divided into four sections, the first on the creation of the world and mankind, it opens with a heart-melting sight in the form of an eight-inch-tall terra-cotta head of a young woman, made between the 12th and 14th centuries in the city of Ile-Ife in what is now Nigeria.

"According to Yoruba myth, Ile-Ife was the birthplace of the first humans, black and white, who were sculptured from clay by the artist-god Obatala, or by the supreme creator Oduduwa, who fashioned the continents. Either would have been proud of modeling this young woman's comely face, scored with undulant lines like flowing water and glowing with serene self-confidence.

"To the same degree that early Nigerian naturalism falls comfortably on the Western eye, the Adam and Eve figures carved from wood by a Senufo sculptor in Ivory Coast or Mali present challenges and excitements. Nearly four feet tall with broad shoulders and wedge-shaped heads, their bodies taut with held-in energy, their skin glowing as if filled with sap, they are tremendous and tender things, complementary emblems of the difference-in-sameness balance that keeps the universe in motion.

"Once human beings arrived on earth, power politics inevitably followed, and explanations of how government, enlightened or otherwise, came to be is the subject of the show's next section. The story told by the ceremonial masks of the Kuba people of Congo includes an incestuous romance. One mask, encrusted with cowrie shells, represents the first Kuba king. Another personifies his sister, by whom he had children. She is depicted with a strip of beadwork covering her mouth like a seal and her cheeks streaked with painted lines that might be tears.

"Luba kingship, by contrast, had more decorous origins. It began with the appearance of a foreign hunter-prince, the young and dashing Mbidi Kiluwe, who established order in an unruly world and whose son, Kalala Ilunga, initiated a dynastic line. To reaffirm this lineage, each new ruler is equipped with a set of ceremonial objects modeled on Kalala Ilunga's, including a staff of office, a bow stand, an abstract map of Luba history known as a memory board and a divination bowl.

"The bowl at the Met is attributed to the so-called Buli Master, a 19th-century artist who was the subject of the first special exhibition organized in the Rockefeller wing, in 1980. It is carved in the shape of a woman holding a hollowed-out calabash to be filled with objects used to extract information from the spirit world. With her grave, downcast face and her body curved over the bowl as if to protect it, she makes a stirring figure, not only as a brilliantly realized sculpture but also, as Ms. LaGamma writes in her exhibition catalog, as a 'profound commentary on the human spirit's desire to obtain knowledge and influence the course of history.'

"Family genealogy is also preserved and celebrated through art. For the Fang people of Cameroon, the reverence for lineage focuses on the bones and ashes of forebears. Thought to insure fertility and the safe birth of children, the relics are kept in special containers and guarded by carved ancestor figures with pudgy, infantile bodies and vigilant adult faces.

"The Baga people of Guinea express clan or family identity through masks and headdresses based on stylized, hyperbolic animal, bird and insect forms. A butterfly mask has an eight-foot wing span two very different masks represent serpents, one as tall as a tree and as thin as a spear, the other a thick, sinuously curving column patterned with Harlequin-like black, red and white diamonds. Together they suggest an intense but objective intimacy with the natural world, of the kind hinted at by the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss when he described finding answers to the most complex existential questions in 'the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.'

"This sense of identification, or connectedness, is highly developed in the carved Ci Wara antelope headdresses of the Bamana people of Mali. This sculptural type has long been an emblem for African art and culture internationally. Mali's national airline uses it as a logo. The 40 examples gathered from American collections for the Met show add up to an optical coup de théâtre, as a similar ensemble did in 'Bamana: The Art of Existence in Mali' at the Museum for African Art last year.

"The revelation in that earlier exhibition, re-emphasized at the Met, lay not in how consistent a particular form could remain through many repetitions but in how inventive it could be. Ci Wara is the name of the mythical Bamana hero who introduced agriculture and gave humans a knowledge of plants and animals. It is also the name of the agricultural fraternity that stages masked performances in his honor, and finally of the masks or headdresses themselves, which are composite images of several animals, including antelopes, anteaters and birds.

"The show has textbook examples of the sculpture, including male and female pairs. With their squat bodies, beaklike snouts and tapering horns, they share basic features, though the male is distinguished by his windblown mane and the female by the fawn she carries on her back. The variations on these classic types and on the subgenre of horizontally oriented headdresses called n'gonzon koun are astonishing: stripped-down or elaborate, realistic or abstract, changing from place to place, artist to artist. In some cases, the shape is dictated by whether a headdress is created for religious ceremonies or popular entertainment, though often forms and functions are interchangeable.

"The Met's installation thrillingly conveys the virtuosity in just this one example of the countless types of sub-Saharan sculpture. What the show cannot do, of course, is fully convey the kinetic dimension of this performance-based art, which is fundamental to how it was imagined and how it appeared to its intended audience.

"This is a recurrent issue with museum displays of objects that do not neatly correspond to the Western concepts of art. And while we may have grown tired of revisiting the problem, it remains important, a matter of seeing clearly. Like the bronze temple figures of Hindu gods from South India, displayed in the Met's Asian galleries and assembled en masse in a glorious show at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington this fall, the Ci Wara sculptures achieve their ultimate meaning in movement and as part of a dynamic environment. In public processions, the Indian images exchange glances with their devotees this interaction gives them life. When the Ci Wara headdresses are worn by acrobatic singers and dancers, the sculptures as much as the performers are seen as vivacious.

"Ms. LaGamma, thoroughly alert to all of this, has included a fascinating compilation of filmed Ci Wara performances in the exhibition, many of them shot by the art historian and collector Pascal James Imperato. They are given far more prominence than in any Met show I have seen before, and this is good. They may be no substitute for being there when an organic, process-based form of African art is danced to completion, but they are just the right finishing, amplifying touch to an economically executed, grandly conceived show."

"Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture'' remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, (212)535-7710, through April 13

Feather Dustup - reflections on the Baer case

A story in the December issue of Art and Auction on Josh Baer was titled "Feather Dustup" and was written by Steven Vincent. Bob Gallegos was quoted in the article on the government's desire to make NAGPRA arrests in order to build case law and legal precedents. In Vincent's story, Baer repeats what he told Pat Reed in the Santa Fe New Mexican, that he "sold illegal Indian artifacts to the FBI because they 'threatened him, persuaded him, played on his sympathies and friendship.' " In the same issue, Vincent also wrote "A Think Tank for Collectors" on the establishment of the non-profit American Council for Cultural Policy to deal with issues of cultural patrimony and international law. This committee is described further in the following article.

Convicted antiquities dealer appeals: The jury was not instructed on a key point of law says Frederick Schultz

A story by Martha Lufkin from The Art Newspaper was sent by Ramona Morris via e-mail. The headline: "Convicted antiquities dealer appeals. The jury was not instructed on a key point of law says Frederick Schultz."

Datelined New York, the story begins, "Frederick Schultz, the New York antiquities dealer sentenced in June to 33 months in prison by the US federal district court in Manhattan for receiving antiquities which Egypt claims under national ownership laws, has appealed his conviction on four grounds.

"The conviction is the first made in a New York court applying the National Stolen Property Act (NSPA) to antiquities claimed by foreign government under a patrimony law. It has attracted wide attention and is being closely watched by art dealers, collectors, archaeologists and museums. The NSPA makes it a crime knowingly to deal in stolen goods.

"Mr Schultz's first argument is the key focus of the case: that the NSPA does not cover antiquities deemed stolen under a foreign nation's ownership laws. He says that a 1970 court decision, McClain, condemned by collectors, but not by the lower New York court that applied it against him, went too far, extending the NSPA to cover not only objects stolen in the traditional sense, but also objects claimed under foreign patrimony laws.

"The 1970s McClain case should not be followed, Mr Schultz says, because a separate, carefully nuanced 1983 statute addressing cultural property imports shows that Congress never intended the NSPA to cover foreign patrimony laws. His conviction based on the NSPA should be reversed, he says.

"Mr Schultz also argues that the court did not let him introduce as evidence at trial a video of his April 1996 speech to the American Association of Appraisers, in which he said that the United States 'do[es] not recognise the patrimony laws of foreign countri