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 countries.' The NSPA requires that the offender knew he was dealing in stolen merchandise. Mr Schultz says that since he believed US law did not recognise foreign ownership laws, he should have been allowed to raise a defense that he made a mistake about US law. The barred video would have shown this, he says.

"Mr Schultz's permitted defense was that he did not know Egypt had an ownership law. But the court told the jury it could convict him not only if he knew of that law, but also if it found he had 'consciously avoided learning' it. That was wrong, Mr Schultz says. To convict him on that ground, the jury had to find that he was 'aware of a high probability' that Egypt had such a law, which he consciously avoided confirming. The 'high probability' test is required in jury instructions in New York, Mr Schultz says, arguing that its omission is grounds to reverse his conviction.

"Finally, says Mr Schultz, it was reversible error for the prosecution to argue that if others in the art world knew of Egypt's ownership law, Mr Schultz had to know it too. At trial, five witnesses testified to their knowledge of the law, including James Romano, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum. The judge allowed the testimony as seeking to establish 'that even an ignoramus' in the field would know about patrimony laws. But none of the witnesses testified as to what Mr Schultz himself knew, and the testimony was prejudicial, Mr Schultz says.

"Friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the appeal have been filed by dealer groups, and by the newly formed Citizens for a Balanced Policy with Respect to Importation of Cultural Property, a group of 27 individuals including Shelby White, a collector and trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Ashton Hawkins, formerly executive vice president of the Metropolitan Museum and counsel to the trustees Senators Robert J. Dole and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who sponsored the 1983 US cultural property legislation and others.

"It is expected that the United States will counter each of Schultz's points in its reply brief to the appeals court."

Surrealism for Sale, Straight From the Source: André Breton's passion for Oceanic art

"Surrealism for Sale, Straight From the Source," was the headline for Alan Riding's December 17 story in The New York Times. In the story, Riding describes André Breton's passion for Oceanic art, which Breton called "one of the great lock-keepers of our heart."

Datelined Paris, the story began, "In photographs André Breton is rarely seen smiling. As the founder and undisputed leader of the Surrealist movement, he evidently took himself seriously. Between the 1920s and 1950s he alone defined the rules of Surrealism and tolerated no challenge to his authority. He encouraged rebellion against prevailing artistic and social norms, but artists and poets who fell out of his favor were summarily expelled from the movement.

"On the other hand, he must have had loads of charisma.

"Over the years, in addition to the artworks he bought, notably primitive sculptures from Oceania, hundreds of paintings, drawings, photographs and books were given to him by friends, followers and little-known artists seeking his blessing. When Breton died at 70 on Sept. 28, 1966, his small apartment at 42 Rue Fontaine in the Pigalle district of Paris was a veritable treasure trove. He had lived there since 1922. His heirs - his widow, Elisa, and his daughter from an earlier relationship, Aube - decided to touch nothing. 'My stepmother lived there, and it was her family environment,' Aube Breton Elléouët, 67, explained. 'For 35 years we looked for an answer to what could be done with this collection. My father had never expressed himself on the subject.'

"Now, two years after Elisa Breton's death, with the French government unwilling to buy the collection, the largest single record of the Surrealist movement is to be sold next spring at the Hôtel Drouot-Richelieu, where Paris auctions are held. One measure of the size of the sale is that the auction house, Calmels Cohen, plans at least six catalogs to cover the 5,300 lots. The auction, from April 1 to 18, is expected to raise $30 million to $40 million.

"Books, which account for 3,500 of the lots, include some dedicated to Breton by Freud, Trotsky and Apollinaire as well as art catalogs and journals. Among the 500 lots of manuscripts are originals of some of Breton's writings as well as records of Surrealist 'games' and experiments. Modern art is represented by 450 paintings, drawings and sculptures and 500 lots of photographs. And there are 200 examples of popular art and 150 works of primitive art, mainly from Oceania. (A description of the collection is online at breton.calmelscohen.com.)

"To compensate for the inevitable dispersal of the collection, the entire contents of 42 Rue Fontaine have been recorded digitally and will be made available through a CD-ROM. 'Everything,' explains a news release by Jean-Michel Ollé and Jean-Pierre Sakoun, who prepared the database. 'Paintings, objects, photos, manuscripts, books. Everything from the least important to the most, the historic and the everyday, the private and the public.'

"The principal item not included in the auction is what is known as Breton's Wall, literally the cluttered wall behind his desk that was featured in many photographs and came to be considered a work of art - the art of collecting - in its own right. The wall was given by Mrs. Breton Elléouët to the National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges Pompidou Center in lieu of death duties owed to the government by the Breton estate.

"The wall's shelves are crowded with dozens of Oceanic sculptures as well as Inuit objects and pre-Hispanic figures from Mexico. On the wall itself are paintings, engravings and drawings by the likes of Francis Picabia, Alfred Jarry, Roberto Matta, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky. And tucked among them is the odd personal item, like a photograph of Elisa Breton.

"Yet the collection to be sold in the spring reveals more about Breton's approach to art, since it includes not only major works, but also lesser works by long forgotten artists and even objects that Breton bought at auctions and flea markets or simply found while out strolling.

"'My father had as much passion for a piece found on the bank of a river as for an important painting in his collection,' Mrs. Breton Elléouët said.

"Still, the auction will not lack important works, notably 'Danseuse Espagnole' or 'Spanish Dancer,' by Miró, Matta's 'Poster for Arcane 17,' Magritte's 'Woman Hidden in a Forest,' an untitled work by Arshile Gorky and 'Danger, Dancer,' a painting on a photograph on glass by Man Ray. It also includes scores of less valuable works by equally famous artists, among them Picasso, Picabia, Arp, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, Victor Brauner and André Masson. More than 100 original prints by Man Ray dominate the photography collection.

"Notably absent is any work by Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian Metaphysical painter, with whom Breton fell out. And a postcard-size collage and gouache is the only work in the sale by Salvador Dali, easily the most famous Surrealist painter, who was expelled from the movement by Breton. The auction also includes no book by the poet Louis Aragon, another friend turned foe. The evidence is clear: Surrealist rebels were expurgated from Breton's life.

"Breton himself, while he dabbled with collages and wrote poetry of considerable merit, was most famous simply for being Breton. He was above all immensely curious, his early poetry and interest in psychoanalysis serving as a springboard for Surrealism's constant exploration of the connections between poetry and life, chance, love and sexuality. To describe Surrealism as a sect is to ignore its enormous influence, but Breton himself was very much its guru.

"'I believe it is into my thought that I put all my daring, all the strength and hope of which I am capable,' he wrote in a letter to the art collector Jacques Doucet in December 1924, shortly after publication of the Surrealist Manifesto. "It possesses me entirely, jealously and makes a mockery of worldly goods.'

"Certainly while Surrealism today is best remembered through the works of Dali, Magritte, Miró and Ernst, visual art was not central to Breton's vision of the movement. Yet he undoubtedly had an eye for innovative art: it was at his insistence that in 1924 Doucet bought one of the landmark works of 20th-century art, Picasso's "Desmoiselles d'Avignon," now a jewel in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"As an inspiration for Surrealism, though, Breton was drawn principally to Oceanic art, which he described as 'one of the great lock-keepers of our heart.' While African art was the rage in Paris at the time, he felt it was too linked to human rituals and animals. He preferred Oceanic art 'for its immemorial effort to express the interpenetration of the physical and the mental, to triumph over the dualism of perception and representation.' Put more simply, he considered it more mystical.

"'Oceanic objects were Breton's companions all his life,' said Pierre Amrouche, an expert on primitive art who is an adviser to the Breton auction. 'It was his family, a tribe of which he was the chief. The very first object he acquired was an Easter Island piece bought when he was 15 with money he was given for good school results.' (The most valuable Oceanic work in the auction is 'Uli,' a four-foot-high wooden ancestor statue from the South Pacific island New Ireland, with a sale price estimated at $600,000 to $800,000.)

"When Breton traveled to Mexico in 1938 to visit the exiled Trotsky, he discovered pre-Hispanic art. And when he was himself exiled in the United States during World War II, he further developed his interest in American Indian and Inuit art, which also joined his collection. From 1941 to 1945, with Ernst, Dali, Matta and other Surrealists also in exile, New York became the temporary capital of Surrealism, although Breton never felt at home there: he never bothered to learn English.

"His own political views were always on the left, but he was a true militant only of Surrealism. He joined the French Communist Party in 1927 and, unaccustomed to taking orders, was soon horrified by its dogmatism. He finally resigned from the party in 1935 (this was the main cause of his rift with Aragon, who stayed in the party), but after the war he was a vocal critic of France's involvement in wars in Indochina and Algeria and an outspoken foe of Stalinism.

"Although Surrealism survived the war, with Breton himself returning to Paris to preside over it, by the 1950s and 1960s it had been overtaken by new art movements. Yet when Breton died, while Surrealist paintings hung on the walls of museums around the world, it was at 42 Rue Fontaine that the soul of the movement resided. Works were frequently loaned for exhibitions, but repeated efforts by his widow and daughter to win government backing for creation of a Breton or a Surrealist foundation came to nothing.

"After Elisa Breton's death in early 2000 and the transfer of Breton's Wall to the Pompidou, Mrs. Breton Elléouët decided to make an inventory of the collection. 'That's when we became involved,' Laurence Calmels, a partner in Calmels Cohen, recalled. 'We arrived at 42 Rue Fontaine, where nothing had changed except "the Wall." Breton's desk was as he left it, his pipe, the bag of tobacco, the books. There were paintings on walls, but we found many covered in dust in a mezzanine. There were cartons of documents. He kept everything. It took three months to do the inventory.'

"It was only then, convinced that she had no alternative, that Mrs. Breton Elléouët reluctantly chose to sell the collection. 'A few works have been sold to the Pompidou and the new Primitive Arts Museum,' she said. 'As for the rest of the collection, during 35 years of representations we received not a single proposal or offer of help.' "

The First Americans Make a Hit With the French

"The First Americans Make a Hit With the French," read the headline for Paula Dietz's December 31 story on an American Indian and pre-Columbian art exhibit in Rouen in the New York Times.

Datelined Rouen, Dietz's story began, "Nothing appeared unusual recently in this northern French city as people scurried across the Esplanade Marcel-Duchamp to attend an opening at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. In the gathering shadows, visitors were greeted on the steps by an imposing statue of Nicolas Poussin. No scene could appear more French than this at one of the 15 provincial museums founded in 1801 under Napoleon, one that continues to anchor local cultural life.

"But the reason for the large turnout, which included city officials and several museum administrators from Paris and other provincial museums, was an exhibition that was not French or even European. It was 'Sacred Symbols: 4,000 Years of Native American Art,' a collection of 183 objects and textiles from eight American museums organized by Frame, the acronym for French Regional American Museum Exchange. Covering a geographic swathe of America from Georgia to the Southwest as well as Mexico, Central America and Peru, the gold, jade, stone and ceramic figures and utensils literally appeared to dazzle viewers with their ingenuity, complexity and unfamiliarity somewhat in the way the unknown 'Treasures of Tutankhamen' held audiences spellbound at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978.

"Founded in 1999, Frame's consortium of nine provincial French and nine regional American museums has lost no time in pooling the members' collections and getting major shows on tour in both countries with scholarly catalogs that are immediate sellouts.

"Last year museum visitors in Bordeaux, Montpellier and Rennes were offered 'Made in U. S. A.: American Art, 1908-1947,' an exhibition introducing artists almost unknown in France like Thomas Hart Benton, George Bellows and William James Glackens.

"This fall 'Raphael and His Age: Drawings From the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille' at the Cleveland Museum of Art featured 27 Raphael drawings supplemented by one just recently acquired by Cleveland.

"Frame's next exhibition, a selection from all 18 museums called 'Masterpieces of French Paintings From the 17th Century,' will open in October at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon.

"'Sacred Symbols," on view here until Jan. 13, will travel to Lyon (Feb. 20 to April 28) and Rennes (May 28 to Aug. 18), cities that are a quick ride by high-speed train from Paris.

"Organized by Evan M. Maurer, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 'Sacred Symbols' takes as its focus the period when various ancient societies developed, albeit slowly, a domesticated agriculture that gave rise to communities, architecture, social status and above all religious rituals evoked by the symbols on view.

"Unlike exhibitions that center on only one civilization, this show ranges from the woodlands east of the Mississippi, beginning in 2500 B.C., to the Incas of Peru in the 1530s (the advent of European incursion) and demonstrates a cross-fertilization that was invigorating if not always friendly. (In 1492, the catalog says, more than 2,000 mutually unintelligible languages were spoken in the Americas.)

"Rouen established a relationship with the Americas as early as the 16th century, when its port was one of those in Normandy that grew wealthy importing dyewood from Brazil for the French textile industry. A native Brazilian village built there in 1550 on the banks of the Seine was visited by royalty, and, the catalog says, Michel de Montaigne gleaned information for his essay 'On Cannibals' from meeting Brazilians in Rouen in 1563. But no customs observed then even hinted at what Mayor Pierre Albertini suggested in his welcoming remarks as 'the belief in these vanished civilizations as a continuous source of extraordinary enrichment through the universality of their art.'

"Like all ancient ritualistic objects, stripped of their ceremonies, many not so pleasant to contemplate, they emerge as sculptural entities that nonetheless represent the physicality of their cultures in both human and animal shapes and pictographic decorations. The highly ordered systems of belief were reflected in such richly ornamental paraphernalia as the scepter with pendant bells carried by a gold Aztec warrior girdled with other dangling elements, not unlike those worn by ancient Tibetan deities.

"These pre-Columbian societies with advanced mathematical systems, epic poetry, music and dance also developed abstract designs that have survived across the centuries into modern crafts.

"At the opening Rouen's museum director, Laurent Salom, led a tour of officials and townspeople who seemed enthralled by the earliest artifacts of Eastern Woodland culture like a bird stone of slate, as sleek as a Brancusi, belying its true purpose as a weight adding speed and power to a spear thrust.

"From the Southwest where the Anasazi civilization has survived in Hopi culture, three ollas or storage jars were united at this exhibition to demonstrate the continuity of form and decoration over several eras. Painted on each of their buff-orange surfaces was the stylized bird wing motif signifying the legendary migrations preceding the settlements on mesas in Arizona and Colorado.

"Nampeyo, a Hopi potter in the late 19th century, based her vessel on fragments uncovered at the site of the Sikyatki Pueblo where the first of the ollas in the show was produced between 1425 and 1600. The 20th-century jar was made by her descendant, Elva Nampeyo.

"While gold ornaments glittered throughout the show, particularly Peruvian goblets and bird pendants worn by high-ranking men in Central America, jade was more rare and was used to carve elaborate headdresses and masks, many of which are on view.

"What appeared to be among the most popular items were ceramic figures: the short squat men of the Olmec and Colima cultures of Mexico, like an acrobat in a back flip supporting a vase and a warrior dancer wearing a feathered tunic.

"Animals - frogs, dogs, jaguars, eagles and lizards - also abounded across civilizations, fulfilling their symbolic roles and providing shapes for vessels, many with stirrup handles. They offer proof, it seems, that early Americans made aesthetics a part of their utilitarian and spiritual lives."

Artist George Catlin Sought Native Nobility and Found a Meal Ticket

Stephen Kinzer's January 1, 2003 New York Times story on George Catlin was headlined, "Artist Sought Native Nobility and Found a Meal Ticket."

Datelined Washington, Kinzer's story began, "Early in the 19th century, as a flood of pioneers began rolling across the American West, the painter George Catlin resolved to travel there and document the unspoiled landscape and native peoples.

"Before the era of photography, few white people had ever seen the faces of Indians. So Catlin's paintings created a stir when he showed them in Eastern cities and in Europe. He went on to become a fervent defender of Indians, even urging that the Great Plains be preserved as a 'nation's park' where they could continue to live their traditional lives. Catlin described the Indians he met as 'nature's proudest, noblest men' and said he hoped 'to rescue from oblivion their primitive looks and customs,' which were being 'blasted and destroyed by the contemporary vices and dissipations introduced by the immoral part of civilized society.'

"Many of Catlin's portraits present Indians as stately and even regal. Some modern critics, however, also find troubling aspects of his art and life.

"A show at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum here puts Catlin's contradictions on display. The exhibition, which runs through Jan. 20, is the most complete display of his work in more than a century, with more than 400 paintings and artifacts.

"Indians are among those who have taken newly critical looks at Catlin's work. W. Richard West, a Southern Cheyenne who is director of the National Museum of the American Indian here, wrote in this show's catalog, 'A native person is challenged, I think, not to feel on some level a profound resentment toward Catlin his obsession with depicting Indians has an extremely invasive undertone to it.'

"Mr. West called him 'a cultural P. T. Barnum, a crass huckster trading on other people's lives and life ways.'

"The show raises questions about the ability of outsiders to interpret foreign cultures, and also about whether it is possible to judge the attitudes of 19th-century Americans by modern standards.

"Catlin financed his five trips to the West himself, and after each of them he tried various means to make money from his experiences. He staged shows of his paintings and artifacts, some of which experts now believe were of dubious authenticity, and he exaggerated his exploits. His celebrated claim to have been the first white person to visit the sacred quarry where Plains Indians mined stone for their pipes, for example, is now widely considered false.

"Catlin was a product of the same romantic imagination that produced European masters like Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner. Like them, he worked from nature, and his works have a sense of immediacy and intimacy. Sometimes he produced as many as three portraits in a single day.

"Romanticism shaped Catlin's view of the Indian as a noble savage whose life in the state of nature was endangered by the encroachment of civilization. His trips ranged from one in the Southeast, where he met tribes that had intermingled with whites for more than a century, to some in the Northern Plains, where he found groups that had rarely if ever been in contact with non-Indians.

"The Indians in Catlin's paintings are often adorned with scalps or bear claw necklaces. Some have richly painted faces and bodies. There are also works depicting various forms of hunting and religious rituals. Scholars say that while some are highly accurate, others are suspect.

"One of Catlin's most powerful paintings is 'Wi-jun-jon, Pigeon's Egg Head (The Light), Going to and Returning From Washington.' It shows two views of the same man. On the left, emerging from the prairie, he looks dignified, carrying a pipe and wearing a long feathered headdress and a richly decorated buckskin cloak. On the right he staggers back toward home in a dandy's suit and top hat, complete with high leather boots and an umbrella. He is smoking a cigarette, and there are bottles of whiskey in his back pockets.

"Although Catlin's Indian Gallery at first attracted crowds in cities like Pittsburgh and New York, and later in London, Paris and Brussels, he did not sell many pictures, and attendance soon dropped. He tried unsuccessfully to sell his collection to the United States government.

"To make the money he staged Wild West shows that foreshadowed those of Buffalo Bill decades later. Catlin's shows included performing Indians, staged battles and even live grizzly bears.

"He was bankrupt and exhausted when he died in 1872 at 76. Seven years later his widow donated the bulk of his collection to the Smithsonian.

"The exhibition here includes some evocative artifacts. Among them are 'peace medals' bearing the portraits of American presidents, intended as gifts for Indian chiefs, and a mask made from a buffalo head that was used in ceremonial dances. There is also a room with four screens, on which video scenes of the West as Catlin knew it, including sequences of wild rivers, buffalo herds and a prairie fire are projected, complete with sound effects. From Washington this show will travel to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Art in Houston.

"Catlin was a self-taught artist whose fame comes as much from the unusual subjects he chose as from his painterly skill. He was working as a lawyer in the 1820s when he saw a group of Indians who visited Philadelphia. Eager to learn more about their culture, he traveled to St. Louis and met William Clark, governor of the Missouri Territory, who had made the famous trek West with Meriwether Lewis. Clark encouraged Catlin's interest in Indians and took him on his first trip up the Mississippi, where he saw what he called 'soul-melting scenery' that would inspire him for years to come.

"Over the next half-century Catlin traveled thousands of miles and painted hundreds of portraits of Indians from nearly 50 tribes, including the Pawnee, Omaha, Mandan, Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfoot, Osage, Choctaw and Kiowa. He kept a meticulous journal that is still considered an important source of information about Indian life, and he is remembered not only as a painter and showman, but also as an ethnographer, geologist and cartographer.

"His experiences led him to conclude that 'the North American Indian in his native state is an honest, hospitable, faithful, brave, warlike, cruel, revengeful, relentless - yet honorable, contemplative and religious being.' "

Online in Ecuador? It's Taking Awhile

Several parts of Rachel Konrad's January 2, 2003 story in The New York Times touch on the American Indian art business. Here is an edited version of her story, "Online in Ecuador? It's Taking Awhile."

Datelined Otalvo, Ecuador, the story began, "Roy Cooper pawed through hundreds of tapestries, searching for a fetching combination of colors and print. Nothing caught his eye until a tiny, toothless woman wearing a felt fedora and dozens of gold necklaces presented a black and tan rug with geometric patterns.

"'Runners in dark shades and earth tones, that's all anyone wants,' Mr. Cooper, a 52-year-old Kentucky native, said in Spanish with a thick Southern drawl. 'The gringos won't pay a dime these days for the brightly colored rugs, so forget the reds and pinks.'

"Mr. Cooper, who has lived in Quito with his Ecuadorean wife, Eulalia, for 23 years, bargained the price from $12 to $10, purchased the Navajo-style floor runner and lit a cigarette to celebrate: The rug will likely fetch $30 or more at auction on eBay, where he sells tapestries, baskets and religious relics at substantial markups. Mr. Cooper, who devotes 15 hours a week to buying, listing and shipping eBay items, clears roughly $1,300 a month from his online business, and up to $2,500 each November and December.

"By contrast, the World Bank estimates that the average Ecuadorean earns $1,460 a year.

"Mr. Cooper's business puts him in an elite group in Ecuador, not only by virtue of his income but also because of the tools with which he makes it. Of Ecuador's 13 million people, only 2.7 percent have been online, according to the government-owned communications company, Conatel.

"Internet entrepreneurs flourish in Ecuador's largest cities, but many are educated businessmen with ties to the United States. Thousands of households in Quito (the capital) and Guayaquil (the largest city) have Internet access, but few rural communities have telephone lines.

"The discrepancies make experts pessimistic. They worry that the rapid pace of change in the technology industry will cause third-world nations like Ecuador to slip further behind Europe and North America.

"'In the late 1990s, everyone jumped up in arms over the digital divide, but it has proven almost impossible to bridge,' said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy-analysis center, and an expert on Latin America. 'It is a region of inequality. Why would access to technology be any different than access to education, health care, employment or financial aid.' "

After a discussion of the difficulties facing the spread of the Internet age in Ecuador, Ms. Konrad returns to Mr. Cooper, who, she writes, "in his way, bridges the divide. In addition to selling items on eBay, he takes custom orders when clients want a statue of a specific saint or a rug of particular dimensions. He sees himself as a New Economy intermediary, a man who connects the haves and have-nots of cyberspace.

"'The Indians are very happy to sell me tapestries for $10, even when they know I will turn around and sell them for three times as much,' Mr. Cooper said as he packed alpaca rugs, wooden statues and glass-framed Amazon insect collections into his sport-utility vehicle. 'These people don't have computers and have never heard of e-commerce.' So they are glad to have the $10, he said. For now, at least."

Where Hills Are Alive (Rivers, Too)

"Where Hills Are Alive (Rivers, Too)" is the headline of a story on "The Edge of Enchantment," a "small but eventful multimedia show" at the National Museum of the American Indian about the encantos, or enchanted places, that pepper the mountains, bays and valleys of Mexico's Pacific coast. The story, by Holland Cotter, was published in The New York Times on January 3. Cotter writes near the end of the story, "at least some old-time devotees of the museum's original, art-crammed uptown headquarters find the experience of the Heye Center in Lower Manhattan maddening and dispiriting."

"Outside a village on the west coast of Mexico," Cotter begins, "a woman was doing her laundry with neighbors. Some pretty gourds floated by in the stream and she reached for one. Suddenly she vanished under the water. When she resurfaced, surprised but refreshed, the neighbors were gone. Years, not seconds, had passed.

"In another part of Oaxaca, a saint's shrine and a spring that never ran dry stood in the path of a government highway. The night before workers were scheduled to dynamite the area, the saint appeared to the chief engineer and told him to change his plans 'or you will regret what will become of you.' The highway was rerouted. The spring still flows. The saint is in his shrine.

"There are other things - many. A statue of an angel kept flying out of a church until a priest removed its wings. A hill called the Rock of the Moors grew and grew like something alive. In a certain lagoon on certain nights you can hear a stone bell ring. 'The place is enchanted,' says Juan García Martínez, a local coffee plantation foreman, by way of explaining this kind of phenomenon. 'That's just the way it is.'

"That's certainly the way it is in 'The Edge of Enchantment' at the National Museum of the American Indian, a small but eventful multimedia show about the encantos, or enchanted places, that pepper the mountains, bays and valleys of Mexico's Pacific coast. Their presence makes the entire area, with its dwindling fishing villages and burgeoning resorts, a kind of spiritual minefield. You have to be careful where you step.

"Although some encantos are widely revered sites of religious pilgrimage and have probably been so since pre-Columbian times, others are strictly of local renown and are visually hard to spot. Many coincide with territorial boundaries or mark the site of historical events, from the Spanish conquest to ethnic wars. Almost all are believed, by believers, to be contact points between the natural and supernatural worlds.

"This otherworldly connection doesn't necessarily mean that encantos are benign. After all, you might be pulled into one and not come out, the way some villagers are lured to the United States - El Norte - in search of work and never heard from again. (The metaphorical link between encantos and immigration is a fascinating subtext of the show.) But good or bad, magnetic or repellent, their charisma can be formidable.

"'The Edge of Enchantment,' organized by Dr. Alicia M. González, a senior curator at the museum, gives a vivid sense of power, though in a way that will not suit all tastes. In a style now favored by this institution, it is an elaborately installed and lavishly illustrated anthropology essay rather than an art exhibition in any traditional sense. The wonderful photographs are by Roberto Ysáis.

"Dr. González's focus is on people, places and ideas, not things. During repeated trips to the rural Huatulco-Huamelula region, she talked with residents, many of them subsistence farmers and laborers, observed their lives and recorded their stories. Those stories, pegged to the encanto theme, are the show. In the galleries, Dr. González has shaped the project as a kind of southern journey, episodic but symmetrical, along the coast and through the mountains of Oaxaca. The journey includes visits to several encantos whose charms belong to the pixilated realm of folklore, but it begins and ends at sites of intense religious devotion.

"The first of these is the shrine called El Pedimento, an open-air chapel sheltering a plain wooden cross above a bay in Huatulco. Centuries before the Spanish arrived, the legend goes, a white-bearded man in a tunic came from the sea to plant a cross, bringing new spiritual beliefs with him. Some accounts identify him as Thomas the Apostle, traveling from India others insist he was the divine Toltec king Quetzalcoatl, god of civilization.

"Whoever he was, he created a magical, wish-granting place. And every year on the first Friday in Lent, which coincides with Huatulco's annual market, pilgrims converge on the shrine, bringing fruit and flowers for the altar and leaving prayers and requests behind. Petitions for specific material things - trucks, houses, farm animals - take the form of handcrafted models of the items desired. In an exhibition film, a man fashions a miniature version of his dream house from sticks and cardboard, then leaves it on the ground at the shrine where, the hope is, the celestial powers-that-be will take note of it before the wind blows it away.

"From there, the path leads to small, remoter spots: the stream where the woman was captured by time the church with the grounded angel the shrine of the saint who defied the department of public works the hill that kept rising like bread. At each place, Dr. González asked a local historian, usually a senior villager, to give an account of the encanto's lore before a video camera, which they do with straightforward grace.

"The show's most dramatic moment comes at the end, in a section documenting the feast of San Pedro in the town of San Pedro Huamelula. Much of the five-day fiesta is taken up by street-theater re-enactments of the area's turbulent history. Masked and costumed townspeople play the roles of Spanish grandees, English pirates and African slaves, outsiders who contributed to the region's cultural fabric. Mock battles ensue, some of them referring to violent ethnic disputes over land and property.

"At the heart of the celebration, though, is a gesture of communal solidarity. At one point, a female alligator, discreetly but securely muzzled, and dressed in white like a bride, is carried through the town. A Mesoamerican symbol of primordial power, she is honored as the original, rightful owner of the land, an embodiment of the spirit of the place and the identity of a people. She is a living encanto, tenderly passed from person to person until everyone in the town has held her and danced with her for a moment or two.

"Experiences of this kind, visually rich but fundamentally performative and conceptual, are what exhibitions like 'The Edge of Enchantment' are about. Even though the concluding section is more object-intensive than others, with masks, costumes and theatrical props on display, filmed images predominate.

"One, projected at cinematic scale, shows a procession of Huamelula women wearing vividly embroidered holiday dresses and carrying pots of flowers and cut-paper flags. The scene is as rich in exquisitely wrought things as any museum gallery. But many of those things are, like the little models left at El Pedimento, occasional, interactive and ephemeral. As in the case of certain conceptual and performance art, their essence survives only in documentary form.

"In short, there is much to be said for the presentation of art as part of a cultural narrative, mediated and dematerialized, rather than as a static display of uprooted, vetted objects. And there's the flip side, presenting cultural narrative as art. These approaches are particularly valuable when an exhibition deals, as this one does, with a non-elite, popular art conceived and made as an organic extension of everyday life.

"At the same time, the National Museum of the American Indian is built on objects. It has a permanent collection of staggering depth and scope, which is virtually invisible at the moment. A handful of pre-Columbian sculptures are on display in poorly lighted vitrines in the Customs House rotunda, but that's about it. No wonder at least some old-time devotees of the museum's original, art-crammed uptown headquarters find the experience of the Heye Center in Lower Manhattan maddening and dispiriting.

"A balance should, and surely can, be struck at the museum's new home, now under construction in Washington. There, one hopes, at least some space will be set aside as a multimedia-free zone for a permanent collection display along traditional lines. By this point, the institution has justified its identity as a broad-based museum of culture with a series of stimulating, thought-piece-style shows, Dr. González's among them. I hope it continues to do so. But I also hope it makes every effort to sustain its credibility as a museum of art in the established connoisseurial sense. There is a built-in audience out there, not small, prepared to thank it for such efforts. And besides, why shouldn't a museum as adventurous and enchanting as this one have it all?"

 

Fall_2003

Tension Over Who Prospers in an Indian Capitol: Anglo v. Arab v. Indian tensions in Gallup's retail milieu

Datelined Gallup, New Mexico, Charlie LeDuff's July 18 story in The New York Times was headlined, "Tension Over Who Prospers in an Indian Capitol," and depicts Anglo v. Arab v. Indian tensions in Gallup's retail milieu.

"This town is lonesome, neon-lighted, tough," the story begins. "They say there are 20 bars in Gallup, 30 churches, 30 pawnshops and 60 trading posts.

"It is a town with 20,000 people, on a stretch of old Route 66 near the Arizona border. On the outskirts live at least 250,000 Indians. Navajo, Hopi, Pueblo, Zuni. This makes Gallup the Indian capital of the United States, and it is the Indians who make Gallup rich and poor.

"Tourists come for their jewelry. The mining companies come for their coal. The government checks come at the beginning of the month. Somehow, the Indians remain poor. Unemployment among the Navajo hovers around 50 percent.

"Of the 60 resale operations that sell Indian jewelry across town, the majority are owned by whites, and about one-quarter are owned by Arabs, newcomers called Hindians by clever locals who are not clever enough to tell the Middle East from the Indian subcontinent.

"Indians make most of the jewelry sold in Gallup. But knockoff merchandise has flooded the market, causing the price for legitimate, handmade goods to drop.

"Indian jewelers are trying to organize a boycott against the Arab merchants, who they believe are importing sham products.

"It has not been successful. In need of cash, many Indian jewelry makers cannot help themselves when their stomachs come calling. They sell pieces for cheap to the merchants, who mark them up 2, 5, even 10 times the purchase price.

"Some sell to the trading post, others to the pawnshop. Either way, it is a non-Indian who profits.

"This has created the boil.

"'You can blame Indian people for their inability to get things together,' says Tom Arviso, publisher of The Navajo Times. 'But there are a lot of sleazy guys on Front Street making it off Indian people. They take advantage of their needs.'

"Arabs see it differently.

"'Don't blame the Arab for the way the market works,' said Ehab Maadi, a native Palestinian who owns the Apache Trading Company. 'Some squeeze harder than others. But we the newcomers are caught in the old history here that we had nothing to do with. The resentment, I usually hear it when people are drunk.'

"For 100 years, it was the whites who profited in trade with the Indians, taking beads and saddles and blankets as collateral for food and clothing until it was time to ship cattle to Chicago or shear sheep for wool. Over the years, the pawn business developed, where the broker takes 10 percent the first month, 4 percent every month thereafter. Today, Indians account for 90 percent of the pawn clientele.

"Now it is the Arabs who own a large and growing part of both the jewelry and pawn trades.

"'The Arabs are taking over, and we don't like it,' said Marie Perry, a Navajo jeweler who will no longer sell to the Arab merchants because, she says, the prices are too low and their business style is rude.

"'I'd rather sell to the Americans,' she said. 'At least I know the white people. They're fair.'

"The first Arabs appeared here about 30 years ago, selling scarves and linen to tourists from their trunks. They discovered first Indian jewelry and second a market for it. They have flourished on the Internet. They are blamed for importing imitations from China and the Philippines.

"The problem has gotten so bad, an estimated 40 percent of the stock in Gallup is knockoff, said Ralph A. Richards, former president of the Chamber of Commerce and a white man who is trying to help form a cooperative of Indian artists and vendors. State and federal law prohibit selling goods as Indian made if they are not.

"'The forgeries are against the law,' Mr. Richards said. 'But it's almost impossible to launch a boycott. When it gets down to it, people need a dollar.'

"The pawn and jewelry business pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, Mr. Richards estimates, from tourists, Internet sales and people down on their luck.

"'The pawn goes back a long time, before we even knew we had a country here,' said Bill Richardson, of Richardson's Trading Company and Cash Pawn, established in 1913. His store is packed with silver and wool and jade and redolent of leather saddles. He is a white man who speaks Navajo.

"'It's the Arabs that got a reputation of exploiters,' he said, not kindly. 'Indian people been coming to me four generations. We've got a relationship built up. It's almost family. I don't sell fakes.'

"Mr. Maadi says he does not sell fakes either. But that is how it goes with stereotypes.

"'We and the Indians, I tell them we have a similar history and we should not have problems,' he said. 'But most don't even know their own history. It's an oasis of illiteracy."'

Amazon Indians Honor an Intrepid Spirit: the death and rites of passage of Orlando Villas Bôas

Here's a story for ATADA's Anthropology majors (and you know who you are): on July 26, a New York Times story headlined "Amazon Indians Honor an Intrepid Spirit"written by Larry Rohter documented the death and rites of passage of Orlando Villas Bôas.

Datelined Yawalapiti, Brazil, the story began, "Traveling for hours by boat and on foot, the chiefs, shamans and warriors arrived from all over the southeastern Amazon. For two days they danced, sang, chanted and reminisced around a painted tree trunk, decorated with a feathered headdress, that represented the soul of a recently departed friend.

"The trunk was placed in the large open space that is the focus of community life here and implanted almost directly above the burial site of a former tribal leader, so he could help guide the spirit to the 'village in the stars.'

"After daubing their bodies and hair with designs in black and red dye, scores of nearly naked men and boys paraded past the totem, whooping and stamping their feet in unison as they moved back and forth.

"This elaborate quarup, or traditional Indian ceremony of lamentation for those of noble lineage, has been performed in the splendid isolation of the jungle for time uncounted. The farewell ceremony is normally an insular event performed before members of the community in honor of one of their own.

"But the departed friend this time was Orlando Villas Bôas, who died eight months ago at the age of 88 and was buried in São Paulo.

"As the eldest survivor of four brothers who devoted their lives to contacting and documenting the native peoples of the Brazilian Amazon and protecting them from the onslaught of modern civilization, he became an especially revered figure here.

"'This is the biggest quarup we have ever had, and maybe our last one ever for a white man,' said Aritana, 54, the village chief. 'It is hard to imagine that any other white man in the future could be a friend of ours as wise and courageous and dedicated as Orlando was.'

"Mr. Villas Bôas first ventured into the Amazon as part of an official government expedition 60 years ago this month. Together with his younger brothers, Álvaro, Cláudio and Leonardo, he explored thousands of square miles of unmapped jungle, set up jungle outposts that today are cities or towns, wrote 14 books and helped found and administer the government's National Indian Foundation. As disciples of Marshal Cândido Rondon, modern Brazil's first great Indian expert, the Villas Bôas brothers' philosophy was 'Die if necessary, but kill never.' They endured countless bouts of malaria, numerous attacks with arrows or spears, and confrontations nearly as fierce with businessmen and politicians eager to open up the Amazon.

"But the brothers never wavered, and on this day Mr. Villas Bôas's grateful charges from nearly a dozen tribes here in the Upper Xingu River basin thanked him by consigning his spirit to the heavens.

"The brothers' most enduring achievement is probably the creation of the Xingu Indigenous Park. At nearly 11,000 square miles, it is a remote area of jungle and rivers larger than Maryland, home to about 4,400 Indians and closed to outsiders except by the invitation of tribal leaders.

"For more than a decade, the brothers fought to obtain the decree setting up the reserve, the first in Latin America. Then they battled 20 more years to have its boundaries legally fixed to protect it from the ranchers, loggers and miners who wanted to see it disappear.

"'This park is Orlando's legacy to us, and this quarup is our way of paying him back for the gift he made,' said Itiamã, a tribal shaman who believes his age to be 56. 'I loved Orlando. After my father died he became like a father to me and always used to tell me that he wanted us to have our own land and to be able to eat what we wanted.'

"Some anthropologists have criticized the brothers' approach as paternalistic, and the brothers themselves often had mixed feelings about their work. 'Each time we contact a tribe we contribute to the destruction of what is most pure in it,' Orlando Villas Bôas often said.

"Western encroachments are indeed visible here. A painting of Spiderman adorns the entrance to one large thatched-roof lodge where a gas stove is also in use, a photograph of the Eiffel Tower hangs in another and some Indians now travel from village to village on bicycles, and even motorcycles.

"But the Indians themselves argue that their situation today would have been much worse had the Villas Bôas brothers not intervened on their behalf. They have been able to retain their original language and religion, and smoked fish and manioc continue to dominate their diet.

"'Orlando used to warn us about his concerns for the future, and everything he predicted has come to pass,' said Paié, a member of the Kayabi tribe who is the director of the park and came nearly 800 miles from Brasília to attend the ceremony. 'Fortunately he trained us and prepared us to deal with the white man and his world.'

"Many of the 50 or so villages in the reserve would have liked to have had the honor of conducting the ceremony. But the Yawalapiti feel an especially strong bond with the Villas Bôas family, which they credit for their very survival.

"When Orlando Villas Bôas first arrived here in the late 1940s, the Yawalapiti had been reduced to fewer than a dozen individuals scattered among several other tribes.

"Mr. Villas Bôas brought them together again and encouraged them to marry members of linguistically similar groups, and today 220 people live in the 14 communal lodges that make up this village, with 60 more Yawalapiti at a settlement nearby.

"'We owe not just the preservation of our language and our culture to Orlando, but also our very existence today as a people,' Aritana, the village chief, said. 'He arranged the marriage of my father and my mother, and he saw me born, so he was always a part of the life of the Yawalapiti and my life.'

"Once the formal ceremony of lamentation concluded, the festivities began. Dozens of men and boys faced off in a huka-huka, or ritualized wrestling tournament, as their mothers, wives and daughters watched and called out encouragement.

"The huka-huka has existed for centuries within individual tribes. But the Villas Bôas brothers persuaded the tribes to make the competition regional and transformed it into a substitute for the unceasing wars that had sapped their strength and unity.

"'By convincing the tribes to stop their internecine fighting, the Villas Bôas brothers were able to get them to concentrate on the bigger enemy,' said John Hemming, the author of 'Red Gold,' a history of Indians in Latin America, who came here from England for the ceremony at the invitation of Mr. Villas Bôas's family.

"Also attending was Orlando's widow, Marina Villas Bôas, who was a 25-year-old nurse when she first arrived here in 1963. She said that from 'the very first day,' she was swept away by the jungle setting and the man, then nearly twice her age, who dominated it.

"'This was where we fell in love and where our sons were conceived and spent the first years of their lives,' she said. 'So I am of course overcome with emotion to be here again in these circumstances and to see this outpouring of affection and regard from Orlando's friends.'

"But the region, isolated as it is - a journey of nearly two days by bus, four-wheel drive vehicle and boat from Brasília - is changed from what it was only a generation ago.

"Today most of the area around the Xingu park has been deforested. Tribal leaders complain that they now see runoff from pesticides and fertilizer in the headwaters of the Xingu, which lie outside the reserve.

"During the quarup, the chiefs and shamans called on Orlando Villas Bôas's two sons, Orlando Jr. and Noel, to continue their father's mission, a challenge the two men said they would accept.

"'The destiny of the peoples of the Xingu is still uncertain, because of what is happening around them," said Orlando Villas Bôas Jr., who spent the first four and a half years of his life here. 'Brazil may have changed, and the times, too, but in my father's absence someone still needs to work to guarantee that 60 years of effort are not lost.'

"When Mr. Villas Bôas died last December in the state of São Paulo, where he was born, he was buried with a flood of tributes and a funeral attended by thousands. But Mrs. Villas Bôas said his family regarded the religious ceremony here as being of even greater importance.

"'If it had been up to Orlando, this is the place where he would have spent his last day on earth,' she said as a pair of shamans sang to his spirit a few feet away. 'His work and his memory, his entire life, were here, and we believe, as the Indians do, that once this quarup is over, we will have no more motive to be sad.' "

Ancient Art at Met Raises Old Ethical Questions

This August 2 New York Times story focuses on how to handle objects with mysterious pasts, one of the most divisive issues in the world of museums, collectors and archaeologists. The headline: Ancient Art at Met Raises Old Ethical Questions. The writers: Martin Gottlieb and Barry Meier.

The story begins: "Almost lost in the sumptuous display of Mesopotamian antiquities in the 'Art of the First Cities' exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum is a small limestone fragment, triangular in shape and delicately carved.

"The piece shows Naram-Sin, a king of the ancient Akkadian empire, seated beside Ishtar, goddess of love, fertility and war. In the show's catalog it is described as an 'extraordinary' example of the era's art.

"It also has another distinction. In terms of its archaeological pedigree, it might as well have fallen out of the sky.

"Until about four years ago, when a scholar spotted it in the Upper East Side home of a prominent collector, the Naram-Sin limestone was essentially unknown. No record of its excavation or history of ownership has emerged. In antiquities circles, that empty space amounts to a warning label: this piece may be the fruit of plunder.

"The 'First Cities' show opened in May, on the heels of the ransacking of the Iraq Museum and as pretty much everyone in the archaeological community was vowing to stanch the trade in stolen antiquities. But as the story of the Naram-Sin limestone shows, the everyday world of buying, selling and exhibiting is often a lot more ambiguous than that. The marketplace is full of objects with mysterious pasts - a lot of them indeed looted - and it's often anything but clear which ones are legitimate and which are not.

"How to handle such orphan objects - is it ethical to buy them, to show them, even to write scholarly articles about them? - is one of the central, and most divisive, issues in the hothouse world of museums, collectors and archaeologists. But the debate has become increasingly public and pointed with the recent events in Iraq.

"In the 'First Cities' show, the Naram-Sin fragment is one of at least eight objects in that murky zone without a clear record of excavation and chain of ownership, known in the art world as provenance.

"The Metropolitan's director, Philippe de Montebello, said the decision to include these artifacts in the 'First Cities' show was neither unusual nor untoward. While a lack of provenance can indicate that an object has been illegally excavated, he said objects without a known provenance also come from legitimate sources, like longstanding private collections. Shunting aside artifacts for lack of documentation, he added, is a disservice to the public and scholars.

"'We are an art museum,' Mr. de Montebello said. 'We have an obligation to knowledge. We have an obligation to the object.' He pointed out, too, that the Met had more rigorous rules for acquisitions.

"But many experts argue that by including such objects in exhibitions, museums abet an illicit trade that destroys archaeological sites and erodes historical knowledge.

"'There is an ethical issue,' said Jeremy Sabloff, director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the most prolific lender to 'First Cities.' 'I personally feel strongly and my staff strongly believes that accepting objects of no or dubious provenance furthers and creates an environment for additional looting, and that destroys the cultural heritage.'

"These experts raise another point: ripped from their resting places, bereft of their context, these objects are themselves as mysterious as their recent pasts.

"The scholar who spotted the Naram-Sin fragment thinks it may have been part of a mold used to emboss shields carried by the king's warriors. Then again, no one can really be sure.

"'Without archaeological provenance,' the museum display card reads, 'both the function and significance of this object remain unknown.'

The Collector

"How the Naram-Sin fragment found its way into the 'First Cities' exhibition is a story of three art-world colleagues, each of whom illuminates some central issues in the antiquities debate - Jonathan P. Rosen, one of the world's most important private collectors of Mesopotamian art Donald P. Hansen, a New York University archaeologist and Joan Aruz, the Met curator who organized the show, a glittering sampling of art from the cultures that developed between the Mediterranean and the Indus in the third millennium B.C.

"Mr. Rosen - a 59-year-old lawyer and chairman of First Republic Corporation of America, a holding company active in real estate - has been an avid collector since college. These days, his collection is especially rich in Mesopotamian cylinder seals - engraved stones used to make distinctive wax impressions. He and his wife, Jeannette, are major contributors to the Met, and have underwritten costly purchases of antiquities for its collection.

"Mr. Rosen declined to be interviewed or respond to written questions. His lawyer, Harold M. Grunfeld, said Mr. Rosen never spoke publicly about his collection. But in a statement, he said his client had acquired the Naram-Sin limestone and two other objects of unknown provenance he lent the Met for the show 'through well-regarded and highly reputable dealers in Europe.' He added, 'We, as attorneys, are satisfied with their provenance, and the origin and legality of our client's purchases.' He did not respond to questions about the dates of the purchases or the previous owners.

"Mr. Rosen has never been accused of wrongdoing, and there is no evidence that he acquired the objects improperly. The limestone fragment may have languished in an old collection before coming on the market. Still, it is clear that in building his collection, Mr. Rosen, like any private collector, has had to negotiate the ambiguities attached to objects with uncertain pasts.

"In the search for pieces with pedigree, collectors are necessarily at a disadvantage. Since host governments control artifacts excavated in sanctioned digs, collectors must buy primarily from galleries, dealers and at auction. And while this marketplace contains many legitimate objects - principally items excavated decades ago, before the proliferation of national laws and international barriers to the illicit trade - it is also teeming with plunder.

"The raw material for this market is clandestinely excavated from the sites of the world's ancient civilizations, from Cambodia to Mali to Guatemala. The Italian authorities say they lose the equivalent of a museum a year to the so-called tombaroli, who pillage ancient Etruscan and Roman burial sites. And after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, thieves are believed to have looted thousands of artifacts from Iraq, which had curbed antiquities exports since the 1930s.

"Indeed, archaeologists and some dealers say many Mesopotamian pieces come to the marketplace with little information about where they were found. Much of this art, they say, was likely looted.

"Given such uncertainties, every transaction implies a decision: how much documentation should the collector demand? Does one assume a piece is looted unless there is clear evidence to the contrary?

"Mr. Rosen is no stranger to the pitfalls of the market. In the early 90s, Turkey sought the return of a statue for sale in a New York gallery operated by Mr. Rosen and Robert Hecht, a dealer who has been involved in the past in disputed sales of objects to the Met. Mr. Rosen arranged for the piece's return both men have said they were unaware it had been exported illegally.

"Over the last decade, Mr. Rosen has donated many Mesopotamian objects of unknown origin - mainly cylinder seals and cuneiform tablets - to institutions like Cornell University. David I. Owen, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Cornell, said the university had accepted the pieces based on Mr. Rosen's assurances they were legally acquired.

"The scholarly interest of collectors is welcomed by archaeologists, even those who have campaigned against the trade in artifacts whose provenance is not known. But what alarms those active against illegal trade in artifacts is what they see as the insatiable appetite of some collectors for fresh material.

"'Collectors who buy unprovenanced pieces form themselves as part of the looting process,' said Lord Colin Renfrew, an archaeology professor at Cambridge University in England.

"Collectors, and some scholars, reject this characterization. John Henry Merryman, an art law expert and professor emeritus at Stanford University Law School, said that while preserving objects in their archaeological setting was 'an important interest which most good people support,' some archaeologists had been too 'bullying' in pressing their case. There is 'no sense of proportion between what archaeologists want and what other people engaged in meritorious activities want,' he said.

"Museums and collectors, he added, play a vital role by preserving art that, while it may lack provenance, has been shielded from war, vandalism or neglect.

"'I think the art trade is essential to what museums and collectors do,' he said.

The Scholar

"Mr. Hansen, the N.Y.U. archaeologist, had visited Mr. Rosen's town house before. But as he toured the collection once more, he fixed on an object he had never seen, or heard of - the jagged, triangular piece of limestone, 10 inches at its widest, depicting Naram-Sin.

"What struck him, Mr. Hansen later wrote, was the way the horned-crowned Naram-Sin was portrayed as a deity alongside Ishtar. Four prisoners, in humiliating restraints, attested to the military prowess that made Naram-Sin the dominant ruler of his day. The piece, he wrote, appeared to be one of the few of royal Akkadian patronage to survive.

"Mr. Hansen set to work on a scholarly article that, while intended for a small readership of experts, could have a profound effect on the piece's standing and monetary worth.

"'If a reputable scholar publishes an article about an artifact, they're giving it the imprimatur of authenticity based on their scholarship and expertise,' said Jane C. Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, the nation's largest archaeological association.

"For that reason, archaeologists are sharply divided about the ethics of publishing articles about artifacts whose provenance is not established. In the 1970s, the institute barred members from making initial presentations about such artifacts in its journals or at its annual meeting.

"In a recent interview, Mr. Hansen acknowledged that some colleagues would not have written about the fragment. But he said its imagery was so unusual that it merited a place in the scholarly literature.

"'It is a great piece of art historically, and I thought it should be known,' he explained.

"His 15-page article, 'Through the Love of Ishtar,' was published last year in England in what is known as a 'Festschrift,' a collection of articles celebrating a scholar's career. (This one honored David Oates, known for his work in Syria and Iraq.)

"The issue of the fragment's origins was addressed in a footnote: 'Regrettably,' he wrote, 'there is no known provenance.'

The Curator

"It fell to Joan Aruz, the curator, to decide whether to include pieces like the Naram-Sin fragment in the 'First Cities' show.

"Met officials declined to make Ms. Aruz available for an interview. But in response to written questions, she said she had become aware of the piece through Mr. Hansen's article and had been impressed by the way its imagery mirrored themes in the show, including Mesopotamia's domination over neighboring lands.

"Like archaeologists, museums disagree about how to treat pieces like the fragment, and again the debate gets back to the question of burden of proof. The clearest dividing line is between institutions that have mainly acquired objects though excavations and those that rely heavily on donations from collectors, like the Met.

"Since the 1970s, archaeologically oriented institutions like the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the Field Museum in Chicago have held artifacts against the harshest light, requiring proof that they were not looted in recent decades. In the 1990s, the British Museum, one of the world's leading museums, took a similar stand.

"'Donors want to give you things,' said Bennet Bronson, the Field's curator of Asian archaeology and ethnology. 'And sometimes, not to put too fine a point on it, those things are stolen.'

"Institutions like the Met say they also require rigorous evidence for acquisitions. But they impose a looser standard to objects loaned for temporary exhibitions. In such cases, Mr. de Montebello said, the museum relies on information from lenders or published articles.

"Given the many legitimate reasons for a lack of provenance, he added, it serves no interest to bar such pieces without clear evidence of looting. Exhibiting them, he said, can have another benefit: 'If there should be a claimant, that claimant can first of all express gratitude that he can lodge his claim because the object was found in the catalog.'

"John Malcolm Russell, an archaeology professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, said that, on the issue of provenance, 'First Cities' was 'pretty typical' for shows in which museums borrow artifacts from private collections.

"The Met opened its doors to the Naram-Sin fragment and at least seven other items with cloudy pasts. Most of them probably came out of Afghanistan, metal pieces from a civilization called Bactria-Margiana that spanned what is now northern Afghanistan and former Soviet republics. In the 1970s and 80s, plundered objects frequently turned up for sale in street markets in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

"One Afghan object in the show is a silver box decorated with lions, bulls and wolves that was lent to the Met in 1999 by Shelby White, a collector and a museum board member. In a 1998 article, she recalled how a dealer showed her and her husband the box in 1990. It was badly damaged and corroded, she said. That could suggest recent excavation.

"'Just imagine what would have happened if all finds from this country had remained in local museums,' wrote Ms. White, whose collection has drawn scrutiny in the debate over items of unknown provenance. 'Many objects in the Kabul museum are thought to be destroyed, victims of the relentless war that has been waged there. Our silver box may, in fact, have been sold by insurgents who needed money to fight the invading Russians.'

"Ms. Aruz, the curator, said that to keep pieces without provenance out of the show 'would seriously damage the work of the scholar.' For example, in representing the Bactrian culture, she said the dearth of documented pieces left her little choice but to use the silver box and other artifacts of unknown origin. As for the Naram-Sin fragment, she said she chose it and the other Rosen contributions - a cylinder seal and an incised jar seal impression - based largely on the recommendation of Mr. Hansen, who wrote the short descriptive essays for the show's catalog.

"Mr. de Montebello says he is happy to have pieces like the Naram-Sin limestone in the show, which runs through Aug. 17.

"'I'm not sitting here defensively,' he said. 'On the contrary, I have to tell you it is my obligation to put these objects forward.'

"Others are less sure.

"'Why would you have an object of this importance and know nothing about where it came from?' said Mr. Bronson of the Field Museum. 'Objects just don't appear.' "

James Welch Obituary

Many ATADA members have read "Fools Crow" and other books by James Welch, who died on August 4. Here is his August 9 obituary from The New York Times, written by Wolfgang Saxon.

"James Welch, a Great Plains Indian writer whose poetry and spare, understated prose explored the complex relationship between his origins and the world outside," Saxon wrote, "which welcomed his work with critical praise and a measure of fame, died on Monday at his home in Missoula, Mont. He was 62.

"The cause was a heart attack, his family said he learned he had lung cancer in October.

"Mr. Welch grew up on an Indian reservation, determined to become a writer and put into words the stresses on a people left out of the American dream. He won wide notice, especially in Europe, with fiction based on real life, including 'Winter in the Blood' (Harper, 1974) and 'The Death of Jim Loney' (Harper, 1979), 'Fools Crow' (Viking, 1986), and 'The Indian Lawyer' (Norton, 1990). All remain in print.

"James Phillip (for Sousa) Welch was born to a Blackfoot father and Gros Ventre mother in Browning, Mont., hub of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Glacier County, not far from Glacier National Park. His great-grandfather played the cornet in John Philip Sousa's band but settled in Browning as an Indian agent, married to a Cherokee woman.

"Having composed some poetry in high school, Mr. Welch studied English literature at the University of Montana in Missoula, graduating in 1964, and pursuing further study in the university's master's program.

"His first book of poetry, 'Riding the Earthboy Forty (World Publishing, 1971), dealt with the landscape, people and history he grew up with. (It was reissued by Carnegie Mellon in 1995 and remains in print.)

"His later novels retained a poetic sensitivity, expressed with laconic clarity. 'Winter in the Blood' and 'The Death of Jim Loney' were set in his familiar haunts. 'Fools Crow' told the story of a band of Blackfoot Indians in the Montana Territory of the 1870s.

"'The Indian Lawyer' reflected on the divide between the Native American and white cultures. 'The Heartsong of Charging Elk' (Doubleday, 2000), his last book, had as its protagonist an Oglala man who as a child witnessed the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 and, shunning life on a reservation, joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, touring Europe with dire consequences.

"Mr. Welch worked with the filmmaker Paul Stekler on a PBS documentary, 'Last Stand at Little Bighorn.' That collaboration resulted in 'Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians' (Norton, 1994).

"He was a visiting professor at the University of Washington and Cornell University, served on the Montana State Board of Pardons and lectured across Europe, where his books, in translation, acquired a following. He was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France.

"Mr. Welch is survived by his wife, Dr. Lois Monk Welch, a retired professor of comparative literature at the University of Montana his father, James P. Welch Sr. of Great Falls, Mont. and two brothers, Timothy R., of Billings, Mont., and G. Michael, of Chico, Calif.

"The author described himself as both an 'Indian writer' and 'an Indian who writes,' but when his first novel, 'Winter in the Blood,' received a Page 1 review in The New York Times Book Review from the novelist Reynolds Price, he called it 'by no means an "Indian novel."' In language and emotion or character, he wrote, it was quickly understandable to all.

"'Few books in any year,' Mr. Price wrote, 'speak so unanswerably, make their own local terms so thoroughly ours.' It did so, he added, through 'its young crusty dignity, its grand bare lines, its comedy and mystery, its clean pathfinding to the center of hearts.' "

String and Knot, Theory of Inca Writing

Read all about it! In Inca! "String and Knot, Theory of Inca Writing" was the headline for John Noble Wilford's New York Times story on August 12.

"Of all the major Bronze Age civilizations," the story began, "only the Inca of South America appeared to lack a written language, an exception embarrassing to anthropologists who habitually include writing as a defining attribute of a vibrant, complex culture deserving to be ranked a civilization.

"The Inca left ample evidence of the other attributes: monumental architecture, technology, urbanization and political and social structures to mobilize people and resources. Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and the Maya of Mexico and Central America had all these and writing too.

"The only possible Incan example of encoding and recording information could have been cryptic knotted strings known as khipu.

"The knots are unlike anything sailors or Eagle Scouts tie. In the conventional view of scholars, most khipu (or quipu, in the Hispanic spelling) were arranged as knotted strings hanging from horizontal cords in such a way as to represent numbers for bookkeeping and census purposes. The khipu were presumably textile abacuses, hardly written documents.

"But a more searching analysis of some 450 of the 600 surviving khipu has called into question this interpretation. Although they were probably mainly accounting tools, a growing number of researchers now think that some khipu were nonnumerical and may have been an early form of writing.

"A reading of the knotted string devices, if deciphered, could perhaps reveal narratives of the Inca Empire, the most extensive in America in its glory days before the Spanish conquest in 1532.

"If khipu is indeed the medium of a writing system, Dr. Gary Urton of Harvard says, this is entirely different from any of the known ancient scripts, beginning with the cuneiform of Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago. The khipu did not record information in graphic signs for words, but rather a kind of three-dimensional binary code similar to the language of today's computers.

"Dr. Urton, an anthropologist and a MacArthur fellow, suggests that the Inca manipulated strings and knots to convey certain meanings. By an accumulation of binary choices, khipu makers encoded and stored information in a shared system of record keeping that could be read throughout the Inca domain.

"In his book 'Signs of the Inka Khipu,' being published next month by the University of Texas Press, Dr. Urton said he had for the first time identified the constituent khipu elements. The knots appeared to be arranged in coded sequences analogous, he said, to 'the process of writing binary number (1/0) coded programs for computers.'

"When someone types e-mail messages, they exist inside the computer in the form of eight-digit sequences of 1's and 0s. The binary coded message is sent to another computer, which translates it back into the more familiar script typed by the sender. The Inca information, Dr. Urton said, appeared to be coded in seven-bit sequences.

"Each sequence could have been a name, an identity or an activity. With the possible variations afforded by string colors and weaves, Dr. Urton estimated, the khipu makers could have had at their command more than 1,500 separate units of information. By comparison, the Sumerians worked with fewer than 1,500 cuneiform signs, and Egyptian hieroglyphs numbered under 800.

"Dr. Urton concedes that his interpretation of a khipu writing system may be hard to prove. No narrative khipu has been deciphered. Spanish conquerors, who suspected the knotted strings might contain accounts of Inca history and religion, destroyed those they came across as idolatrous objects. The few existing descriptions of the khipu by explorers and missionaries lack enough detail for an understanding of the way the Inca made and 'read' them.

"Other Inca scholars generally agree that the khipu may have served as more than accounting devices or memory aids, and may have been a medium for recording historical information. But they reserved judgment on Dr. Urton's binary code hypothesis.

"'Most serious scholars of khipu today believe that they were more than mnemonic devices, and probably much more,' said Dr. Galen Brokaw, a specialist in ancient Andean texts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He was quoted in an article about the khipu in the June 13 issue of the journal Science.

"Dr. Patricia J. Lyon of the Institute of Andean Studies in Berkeley, Calif., was unmoved from her position that the khipu were mnemonic devices, personalized visual and tactile cues for the recall of the information retained in the memory of the maker. If that was the case, the khipu would not be a form of writing because they would have been understood only by their makers, or someone familiar with the same memorized accounts or narrative.

"'People feel this great need to pump up the Inca by indicating that the khipu were writing,' Dr. Lyon said.

"Dr. Urton said in an interview that others would soon be able to test his theory and possibly find other patterns and clues in the khipu he studied. A detailed khipu database, financed by the National Science Foundation and prepared with the help of Dr. Carrie Brezine, a Harvard mathematician and weaver, is expected to be ready this fall and will eventually be available online.

"Experts in the culture of early Peru think it understandable that textiles would have been the chosen medium for writing. The Sumerians and Babylonians wrote on clay, the Egyptians on stone and papyrus. The Inca may have used cloth, though, to store and communicate knowledge because to them cloth was a widely used marker of status, wealth and political authority.

"Dr. Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in early Andean technology, said that 'fibers were the heart of Andean technologies of all kinds, even long before the Inca, and so it doesn't surprise me that people would have thought of using khipu perhaps for some sort of writing system.'

"Early Spanish colonists gave conflicting accounts of the practice. A drawing of a khipu maker in an Inca storehouse seemed to reflect the view that the knotted strings involved record keeping. A Jesuit chronicler said the khipu were like ledgers or notebooks that overseers and accountants used 'to remember what had been received and consumed.'

"Another account tells of Spanish travelers who came upon an old Indian man who tried to hide the khipu he was carrying. Under questioning, the Indian claimed the khipu recorded the activities of the conquerors, 'both the good and the evil.' The Spanish burned the khipu and punished the Indian.

"Not until the 1920s did scholars seem to reach a consensus on what the khipu were. From studies of a collection of knotted strings at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, L. Leland Locke, a science historian, concluded that they did not represent a conventional scheme of writing but signs recording columns of numbers. Khipu makers must have been bookkeeping bureaucrats.

"This remained the prevailing opinion until the last two decades. Husband and wife researchers, Dr. Robert Ascher, a retired Cornell archaeologist, and Dr. Marcia Ascher, a mathematician at Ithaca College, reopened debate by pointing out that khipu seemed to use numbers as both numbers and labels. They estimated that about 20 percent of existing khipu were 'clearly nonnumerical' and could have been examples of an early form of writing.

"Dr. Urton has carried the idea further. A creator of khipu, he posits, made a series of choices involving the type and color of string and each knot. Each choice contributed to creating a binary signature. A certain string configuration could represent signs that stood for a value, object or event, much as graphic signs do in familiar forms of writing.

"Emboldened by this insight, Dr. Urton said in his book that the Inca 'may well have been recording full subject-object-verb notations in the khipu.'

"Dr. Urton based his research primarily on khipu specimens at museums in the United States, Germany and Peru. A discovery in 1997 in northern Peru, at a burial site of the Chachapoya culture, yielded 32 khipu with exceptionally elaborate and varied types of string patterns. Strands hanging from the horizontal cord had their own secondary and tertiary pendants.

"These complex pendant attachments, he wrote, 'must have been an important mode of binary coding in the khipu.'

"A close examination of Dr. Urton's new database of khipu elements by other scholars, including linguists and pattern-recognition experts, may win wider support for the writing hypothesis.

"'It's much too early to say anything about how this will all come out,' said Dr. Lechtman of M.I.T.

"More definitive would be the discovery of an Inca 'Rosetta stone.' It was such a trilingual inscription that finally enabled scholars to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.

"A colonial governor had khipu makers 'read' some strings and scribes record the accounts in Spanish. This could have been a start toward decipherment, if only the khipu had been preserved.

"A prospective Rosetta stone was announced in 1996 by an Italian amateur historian, who claimed to have found a translation into Spanish of a song encoded in a khipu. But other researchers have not been allowed to examine the material, and Dr. Urton said that many questions had been raised about its authenticity.

"Dr. Urton holds out more hope of making a breakthrough discovery in the Chachapoya material. Most of the khipu there appear to be from the early colonial period. For that reason their encoded messages are more likely to have been transcribed in Spanish documents as the sought-after Rosetta stone of Inca writing. If, that is, the Inca wrote with strings and knots."

Maine Indian Tribe Dips Back In To Craft of Birch-Bark Canoes

A front page story in the August 29 issue of The Wall Street Journal by Robert Tomsho was headlined, "Maine Indian Tribe Dips Back In To Craft of Birch-Bark Canoes."

Datelined Indian Island, Maine, the story began, "Watched by a dozen members of the Penobscot Indian tribe, Steve Cayard plunged a pair of tongs into a steaming vat of boiling water and extracted a 4-foot-long cedar slat.

"'You need to cook them for about 10 minutes,' he said. Mr. Cayard knelt on the steaming board and slowly pulled its ends up to form a wide, U-shape -- perfect for a canoe rib.

"Mr. Cayard, a white man with long interest in Indian culture, was hired last year to help the Penobscot tribe revive a lost art form: making birch-bark canoes. The Penobscots once were among the most-famed builders of canoes on the East Coast, using the graceful craft to ply the local rivers and bays. After a trip here in 1857, Henry David Thoreau praised their boats as 'neat and strong,' adding that they were the envy of white men who saw them.

"But the Penobscots are believed to have last made bark canoes in 1920, when several tribal craftsmen were invited to paddle to Plymouth, Mass., to take part in the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing.

"These days, about 500 of the tribe's 2,100 members live here in the small homes and house trailers of Indian Island, a wooded 360-acre reservation in the middle of the Penobscot River, just across from Old Town, Maine.

"In a community where the median household income is only about $20,000 a year, the canoe-making venture has elicited mixed emotions. Some dismiss it as frivolous, while others grumble about relying on Mr. Cayard. 'Just the fact that he is a non-Indian is why,' says Richard Hamilton, a former Penobscot chief.

"But Barry Dana, the tribe's current leader, maintains that, with no skilled Indian available, Mr. Cayard's presence is crucial to a cultural revival he promised when he was elected chief three years ago. 'If there are still some tribal members uncomfortable with it, then so be it,' the 44-year-old chief says. A few tribal leaders also hope some much-needed jobs might come from the effort by turning canoe-making into a commercial venture.

"With money from a $5,000 state grant, Mr. Cayard was hired last summer to conduct his first three-week workshop on Indian Island. The tribe has since landed another $100,000 in federal grants to film the canoe-making process and look into whether there is a viable market for high-end canoes handcrafted by the tribe. 'It's just a privilege to know these people,' says Mr. Cayard, who wears his brown hair in a long ponytail. 'It's their culture, really, that my skills come from.'

"Mr. Cayard, 47, abandoned the conventions of his own culture long ago. The son of Quaker college professors from Wheeling, W.Va., he became enthralled with Indian traditions at 16, when his father gave him a book about bark canoes. Mr. Cayard dropped out of high school and made his way to rural New England. There, he worked planting trees and picking apples while teaching himself to hunt, tan hides and build canoes.

"By the mid-1980s, he'd moved his family into a remote home in Wellington, Maine, that was powered by solar panels and heated by wood that he chopped himself. Mr. Cayard continued perfecting his craft by examining old canoes in museums and private collections. These days, his canoes have decorative bark inlays and price tags of $10,000 or more.

"In 1989, Mr. Cayard's daughter, then 9, visited the Indian Island elementary school as part of a school exchange program. Mr. Dana, the tribe's future chief, was teaching a class there in Indian culture. He was stunned by how much Amber Cayard knew about the Penobscots and asked to meet her father after learning he made Indian-style canoes. 'Growing up on the reservation, I saw no one with a birch-bark canoe,' says Mr. Dana, who grew up paddling factory-made boats.

"In a way, the fame of the Penobscot canoes may have contributed to their demise. Old Town Canoe Co., located just across the river from Indian Island, started making wood and canvas canoes modeled after those of the tribe in 1898. By 1910, when Old Town Canoe and rivals churned out 3,500 craft, the town of Old Town boasted it was 'the canoe center of the world.'

"Over the years, hundreds of Penobscot men worked at the factories, putting them in daily contact with modern watercraft far simpler to acquire and maintain. 'It was just easier to buy them than to make them,' says Mr. Hamilton, the former chief. Eventually, canoe-building just withered away, along with other traditional crafts such as basket-making.

"Even for a skilled craftsman, building a bark canoe can involve more than 400 hours of meticulous labor. Harvesting the canoe's outer skin means searching the backwoods for a birch roughly 18 inches in diameter and with a long expanse of clear bark. After soaking, the bark is sewn into the rough shape of a canoe and its interior is lined with thin planks made from cedar logs that are hand-split and planed to the proper thickness. The rounded inner ribs that press the planking tight against the bark must be carved and bent into shape.

"Then there is the job of searching for the roots of black spruce trees, which are split into thin strips and used to lash the bark to the canoe's frame. It's sweaty, miserable work. The black spruce is often found in moist, peaty bogs full of mosquitoes and stinging black flies. Last year, some younger Penobscots journeyed with Mr. Cayard to dig for spruce roots -- and promptly quit the canoe seminar.

"On a recent steaming August morning, Mr. Cayard led a group of 12 Penobscots into a woodland bog. They soon fell to their knees and began to scrape at the black mud below them with knives, sticks and bare hands.

"'I don't know if I can tell a black spruce from a red spruce from a white spruce,' said Nicholas Dow, the tribe's economic-development director, as he swatted at bugs.

"Looking up from his own spot in the mud, Mr. Cayard advised that the interior of the black spruce root is pinkish, with a thin red coating. 'Scratch the bark,' he said, while slowly pulling up a root of his own.

"By the end of the morning, they gathered 1,000 feet, enough for one canoe. The tribe expects to complete that canoe any day now. While last summer's session also produced a canoe, its skin cracked from stern to bow after one enthusiastic builder took the craft from its warm storage room into subzero weather last winter, aiming to show it off at a local school. Although Penobscots traditionally kept their canoes outside in the winter, they didn't typically expose them to such rapid changes in temperature.

"Still, if Mr. Cayard's efforts never spawn a single job, some members of the tribe have been inspired. Sitting in his garage on a recent afternoon, retired telephone technician and tribal elder Butch Phillips, 63, fussed over the nearly completed bark canoe he had dreamed of building for years. Mr. Phillips, who has taken Mr. Cayard's class both years it has been offered, said he felt reconnected with what was once a proud part of life for his ancestors, and reckons he will burn tobacco or make some other traditional offering when he first puts his boat into the river. Part of his thanks will be for Mr. Cayard. 'We consider him a friend of the tribe,' he said."

The Responsive Eye: A Collector's-Eye Look at North American Indian Art

Roberta Smith's September 12 New York Times review of "The Responsive Eye," a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was headlined "A Collector's-Eye Look at North American Indian Art. The exhibit runs through December 4.

The story began: "Maybe the best compliment one can give an art exhibition, especially one devoted to historical material, is that it makes you want to look long and close at everything on view and that the installation enhances this process. 'The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art handily meets those goals. It puts on view a glorious promised gift from the collector Ralph T. Coe: more than 200 works, many hovering near masterpiece level, some dating from prehistoric times.

"The show's title may sound familiar. 'The Responsive Eye' was one of the Museum of Modern Art's best-known, or most infamous, exhibitions of new art. Held in 1965, it is remembered today largely as a joke: a precipitous celebration of the newly minted, short-term trend of Op Art painting and sculpture, which generally reduced vision to automatic reflex and was over almost before the show closed.

"The Met's 'Responsive Eye,' however, is on all scores a signal event. It represents a stunning array of Indian cultures with utilitarian and ceremonial objects that date mostly from the 18th and early 19th centuries. These include decorated blankets, masks, Kachina figures, pipes, baskets, ceramic storage jars, tools, weapons, lavishly beaded garments, bags and moccasins, as well as items made for sale to white settlers, like Huron birch bark trays embroidered with moose hair in European-influenced floral motifs. It is unusual and inspiring to see a relatively small number of outstanding, judiciously selected objects achieve such a panoramic scope.

"The show reflects the Met's belated and increasing recognition of one of the world's major long-term artistic traditions, and the gift adds substantially to its relatively meager holdings in this area. It will increase the museum's North American Indian objects by one third, from around 600 pieces to 800.

"The Met has mounted very few shows on this subject. This one, handsomely displayed in generous galleries, has been accorded quite a bit more dignity than the last one - an excellent show of works on long-term loan from the collection of Charles and Valerie Diker, which opened in 1998 in the busy hallway between the Rockefeller and Wallace wings.

"Perhaps most important, the responsive eye revealed here is specific and personal it belongs to one man who has spent a lifetime indulging, training and expanding his vision. The acuity of Mr. Coe's eye permeates this show. With luck, it will sharpen yours.

"Mr. Coe, universally known as Ted, might be described as an all-purpose art-lover, or a museum's dream collector. The son of a collector of Impressionist paintings who was also a longtime trustee at the Cleveland Museum of Art, he's been around art and museums all his life. He studied European painting at Yale and worked for many years at the Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City, as curator and then director. His interest in American Indian art began abruptly in 1955, when he was transfixed by a small Northwest coast totem pole model in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Nine such totem pole models stand near the opening of the show, getting things off to a jaw-dropping start.

"After this encounter, Mr. Coe began collecting and studying American Indian art, ultimately forming an encyclopedic collection of some 1,100 objects. Starting in 1973, he traveled all over the United States and Canada, learning about techniques and symbolism firsthand and immersing himself in contemporary Indian culture.

"His research culminated in two landmark exhibitions: 'Sacred Circles: 2,000 Years of North American Indian Art,' which opened at the British Museum in 1976 and traveled to the Nelson, and 'Lost and Found Traditions: Native American Art, 1965-1985,' seen at the American Museum of Natural History and nine other American museums beginning in 1986.

"Mr. Coe's determination to show that Indian art is a living tradition is evident in his inclusion of work by several 20th-century artists. His gift to the Metropolitan is no exception. In particular, a terra-cotta pot encircled by a snake chasing its own tail, attributed to the great San Ildefenso Pueblo potters Maria and Julian Martinez, and a mask of a noblewoman by Robert Davidson, a Haida born in 1946, prove this point. A wide-eyed Yagim mask by George Walkus, a Kwakwaka'wakw active in the 1920s and 30s, appears on the catalog cover.

"Mr. Coe's autobiographical essay in the show's catalog, 'The Re-education of an Art Collector: From Aesthetics to Culture,' reveals a man who has maintained his faith in connoisseurship while moving toward a wider understanding of the complex motivations, beliefs and uses that characterize the art of the North American Indians.

"It is a careful balancing act. For example, he points out that, as with many non-Western cultures, none of the many Indian languages have a word for art, so integrated is art into their daily, social and spiritual lives. But he also argues that the quality and the power of the objects, their ability to communicate through time and across ethnic lines, justify their inclusion in art museums among the canonical works of other cultures.

"The works in the show, helped along by succinct, informative labels, offer independent corroboration. It seems pointless to rejoin the argument of whether objects speak for themselves or say what we want them to say, which goes another round in the show's catalog. Whoever is doing the talking, these works demand and hold your attention, conveying an intensity equal to any other culture's in emotional expression, sophistication and refinement of workmanship.

"Beginning with works by the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Yup'ik and other peoples of the Northwest coast and Alaska, the installation sweeps back and forth across the North American continent, representing more than 70 groups, subgroups and pueblos, and including the names of more than 20 19th- and 20th-century artists. At every turn, it provides a strong sense of the spiritual beliefs and material world from which these objects spring, the dominating influence of nature as well as the ingenuity and skill that made them possible. Also addressed is the influence of European taste and goods, most outstandingly colored glass beads but also blankets, buttons and silk.

"In one vitrine near the show's entrance, two of the Haida totem pole models were carved and painted for the tourist trade. Their stacks of bird and bear heads are noticeably less fierce and focused than those of their three unpainted neighbors in the case, one with eyes of inlaid abalone shell. (The use of miniaturization as a method of codifying designs and decorations is echoed in examples of Tlingit and Quinault canoes, Aleut kayaks and Sioux and Blackfoot tepees.)

"The show is bracketed by especially outstanding examples of appropriation. In the beginning there are Tsimshian and Haida button blankets, dark blue textiles with rampant bears in red appliqué that are bordered by a pulsating white line made from shell buttons. At the end is an Osage wearing blanket bordered and fringed in lengths of coral, cream and green silk, punctuated by five handprints in appliquéd coral silk.

"By the end of this exhibition, you may feel that the distinction between utilitarian and ceremonial doesn't matter much. The handle of a Penobscot crooked knife, carved in wood to represent a delicate but firmly clenched fist that seems raised in warning, is as full of import as a small articulated Tlingit transformation puppet, a skeleton made of bone, sinew and abalone-shell inlay whose rib cage opens to reveal a snarling face.

"One can also contrast the relatively coarse split-ash carrying baskets of the Onondaga and Pequot peoples, painted in simple motifs, with the infinitesimally fine, sometimes feathered weaving of the small baskets made by the Pomo Indians of California. In the catalog description entry for the latter, Mr. Coe notes that they were made as gifts and so constitute a rare example of art for art's sake.

"What may stay in your mind is the seeming determination, conscious or not, that every object should be all that it could be - which may be all the definition of art that is needed."

Who Owns Native Culture: An anthropologist is skeptical about extending the logic of group rights to music, art and origin stories

Richard A Shweder's review of "Who Owns Native Culture" by Michael F. Brown ran in The New York Times Book Review on September 14. The Times summed up the book by saying, "An anthropologist is skeptical about extending the logic of group rights to music, art and origin stories.

The review began: "Some years ago an American anthropologist I know, who was trained at the University of Chicago, sought permission to conduct research among the Maori people of New Zealand. During one part of an elaborate bureaucratic process he found himself being interviewed by a 'native,' a rather well-traveled Maori with an Oxford University degree in anthropology. This cosmopolitan graduate of aboriginal descent was a gatekeeper for his 'indigenous people' and a legally empowered guardian of their group privacy. He believed that Maori rituals, art, legends and history belonged to and were, in some sense or other, owned by the Maori. He believed that the Maori people had a collective interest in regulating the scholarly interests of outsiders and in controlling how Maori traditions got talked about in the rest of the world.

"The man took his job seriously. He interrogated the American petitioner and expressed doubts and reservations about the 'Chicago School of Anthropology' as a way of representing the Maori way of life. And he was in a position to say 'no' -- to limit research and restrict the flow of information and to constrain the freedom of academic outsiders to associate with Maori insiders, including those insiders who might be willing or even eager to speak to any American anthropologist who came along. One does not know whether to laugh or cry.

"Every once in a while critical reason triumphs over political correctness and identity politics, and the result can be exhilarating. Michael F. Brown, who is the Lambert professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at Williams College and knows more about intellectual property law than most legal scholars, has written a brave, logical and even witty book about some of the hazards and challenges of cultural heritage protection. His book is titled 'Who Owns Native Culture?,' yet his message is one of skepticism and caution about extending the logic of ownership and group rights to the music, art, religious rituals, origin stories and botanical knowledge of any cultural tradition.

"Do we want to turn culture into a legally protected resource? Is cultural heritage something that ought to be owned, patented, copyrighted, trademarked, licensed, exclusively controlled or treated as the private property of particular ethnic groups? What are the risks to a liberal pluralistic democratic society when ethnic groups are empowered with group rights? Does the assertion of cultural ownership by indigenous peoples threaten the public domain? Does it hazardously restrict that region of our open society -- the intellectual and social commons -- where members of different traditions can meet, mix, creatively invent hybrid cultural forms and do so freely and without bureaucratic surveillance?

"'Who Owns Native Culture?' describes a series of fraught and provocative incidents in contemporary democracies, especially the United States and Australia, where there is a history of domination and even genocide of native, aboriginal or indigenous groups. In these multicultural countries, historically devastated minority groups are understandably and often legitimately sensitive about the appropriation, commercial exploitation and disrespectful use of their culture.

"So what happens in a liberal democracy when Australian Aborigines demand that museum curators forbid all female staff members from handling the indigenous sacred objects that are on display in Sydney, out of respect for the sexual division of the world in Aborigine society? Or when Native American Lakotas object to the desecration of a sacred site by mountain climbers and by New Age religious worshipers, and the sacred site just happens to be Devils Tower National Monument (made famous by the movie 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'), which is located in a public park in Wyoming?

"What code of cultural privacy makes sense when representatives of the Pueblo community complain that the sun symbol on the New Mexico state flag was stolen without permission from a design on a 19th-century ceramic pot made by an anonymous and unidentifiable American Indian potter? What about the disempowered forest-dwelling pygmies of Central Africa? Is there a meaningful modern sense in which they can be said to own their traditional flute music and distinctive form of yodeling, traces of which have diffused throughout the globe and can be detected in Herbie Hancock's album 'Headhunters' and Madonna's 'Bedtime Stories'? Should the pygmies be compensated? Why and how? What are our legal responsibilities under such circumstances? What are our moral responsibilities?

"Brown's writing is gorgeous, often funny, and he has a near perfect sense of the absurd. Recoiling at the idea that all knowledge is parochial and owned by those who are insiders (as though only African-Americans are entitled to rap or sing the blues), he points out that reggae is currently the music of choice among young American Indians on the Hopi reservation. In the context of a discussion of 'bioprospecting' he acquaints us with the famous ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, who pioneered the study of the roots and shoots of the forest and the medicinal plants of indigenous people: 'He may have been the only Republican in America who freely admitted to having sampled just about every mind-altering plant yet discovered in the New World.' With regard to the moral majority of rugged individualists in the state of Wyoming who are indignant about the rights claims of American Indians, he writes: 'An ethic of self-reliance contrasts with the reality of ranching and mining enterprises heavily subsidized by the federal government -- hence the criticism that Wyoming, like other Western states, practices a form of socialism for the rich that benefits a few corporations and cattlemen (welfare cowboys').'

"Commenting on the use of the name Redskins (as in Washington Redskins) he writes: ''Native American cultures have survived five centuries of pestilence, military conflict and dispossession. Compared to these catastrophes, in what meaningful sense does the name of a professional football team put their survival at risk? One could argue just as convincingly that petty insults actually promote cultural survival by bringing Indians together in solidarity against the dominant culture.' This writer is a sardonic liberal pluralist who is prepared to defend both liberalism and pluralism without resorting to group rights and ideas of exclusive possession.

"The courage in Brown's book is his insistence that we live in a morally complex world. Part of the complexity stems from the fact that, despite some of the illusory claims associated with the Western Enlightenment, modern, postmodern and premodern values continue to coexist even in the developed world and they make powerful and contradictory claims on our sympathy and judgment. No one really owns culture is Brown's message: cultural elements are too hard to define, too easily copied or too long detached from their points of original creation. Contact between cultures and processes such as borrowing, appropriation, migration and diffusion have been ubiquitous for so long that little remains of the authentically indigenous (southern Italian cuisine got its tomatoes from the New World, the Navaho got some of their current practices from the Hopi) which is just as well, and a very good thing for the creative and innovative side of the human search for meaning.

"The bottom line in Brown's book is his challenge to both multiculturalists and liberal individualists. For he believes we can develop informal social norms of decency and respect that are responsive to the concerns of indigenous peoples without turning our society into a patchwork of legally empowered illiberal cultural enclaves. He seeks the middle road. Not the postmodern path, at the end of which there is a free flow of everything, all boundaries are down, everything is up for sale and nothing is sacred. And not the premodern path either, at the end of which everything is private, secreted and shielded from the interest and interests of outsiders, and the intellectual and social commons have been destroyed. It remains to be seen whether in a commercial and legalistic society such as ours there really is a middle road."

Summer_2003

Schultz Appeal Denied

An explanation of the verdict and advice from ATADA president Ramona Morris

On June 25, 2003, The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied the Appeal of art dealer Frederick Schultz and upheld his earlier conviction. He had been convicted of one count of conspiracy to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities that had been transported in interstate and foreign commerce, under the National Stolen Property Act (NSPA).

ATADA was one of six Art Dealer and Appraiser organizations jointly filing an amicus curiae brief in Schultz's favor, as we felt that this action should have fallen under the Cultural Property Implementation Act (CPIA) rather than the NSPA. The other organizations in this group were The National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental & Primitive Art, Inc., The International Association of Professional Numismatists, The Art Dealers of America, The Professional Numismatists Guild, and the American Society of Appraisers. An ad hoc group called Citizens for a Balanced Policy with Regard to the Importation of Cultural Property, made up of politicians, academics, and art collectors, also filed a brief in support of Schultz. An opposing brief was filed by The Archaeological Institute of America, The American Anthropological Association, The Society for American Archaeology, The Society for Historical Archaeology and The United States Committee for the International Council on Monuments and Sites.

The judge's review of the briefs states that the two briefs in favor of Schultz "argue primarily that allowing Schultz's conviction to stand would threaten the ability of legitimate American collectors and sellers of antiquities to do business." He seems to have dismissed the point we were trying to make that the NSPA was misapplied. His interpretation of the opposing brief is "that by sustaining Schultz's conviction and applying the NSPA to cases like this one will help to protect archaeological and cultural sites around the world."

He concludes ".that the NSPA applies to property that is stolen from a foreign government, where that government asserts actual ownership of the property pursuant to a valid patrimony law."

There you have it. Be very careful of the provenance of the materials you buy or sell. This is something we all already know. This just nails it down a little tighter.

Here is the NADAOPA Statement Concerning the Schultz Decision

The National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art (N.A.D.A.O.P.A.) cannot and does not address the facts or the complex legal issues raised by the prosecution of Frederick Schultz, a prominent New York art dealer.

N.A.D.A.O.P.A. supports the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property as implemented by the U. S. Congress under the Cultural Property Implementation Act of 1983.

N.A.D.A.O.P.A. members are committed to the highest ethical standards in all their business practices, including careful research and the exercise of due diligence when acquiring works of art. Its members are dedicated to providing American collectors and museums the opportunity to experience and to acquire Ancient, Asian and Tribal art from all around the world.

N.A.D.A.O.P.A. believes that its members, working together with collectors and museum curators, have succeeded in preserving the works of art of many nations by making them available for study and appreciation here in America and throughout the world. We look forward to continuing this important work now and in the future.

Site Seen as Possible Home of Pocahontas

"Site Seen as Possible Home of Pocahontas" was the headline for John Noble Wilford's May 7, 2003 story in The New York Times.

"In American folk history," Wilford's story began, "the Indian princess Pocahontas befriended English settlers and saved Captain John Smith from certain death at the hands of his Algonquin captors. It happened near the Jamestown colony in Virginia, within a year of its founding in 1607. Or it may be only a story.

"But Pocahontas really was a princess, daughter of the powerful Powhatan, whose chiefdom encompassed much of coastal Virginia. She got along so well with the English that she eventually married one of them, John Rolfe, and was received at the court of James I.

"Now Virginia archaeologists think they have found the site of the large village, Werowocomoco, where Pocahontas and Powhatan lived in the early 17th century. As the seat of the paramount chief of the region, it was the most prominent village in coastal Virginia. Scholars hope the remains will provide clues to understanding one of the most advanced chiefdoms in eastern North America.

"The archaeologists announced at a news conference in Gloucester, Va., yesterday that they had uncovered a significant distribution of Indian pottery and projectile points, along with English glass beads and metal objects, on a farm on the banks of the York River, near Chesapeake Bay. It is about 12 miles from Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America.

"The site, experts said, fit English descriptions of the topography around Powhatan's central village. Its position corresponded to the village's as given on contemporary maps, including John Smith's own 1612 map of Virginia.

"Dr. E. Randolph Turner III, an archaeologist with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, said that recent excavations at the site provide 'convincing evidence that we have indeed found the village.'

"Dr. Martin Gallivan, an archaeologist at the College of William and Mary in nearby Williamsburg, was a little more cautious. In a telephone interview, he said, 'We're reasonably certain we are in the right place.'

"Other archaeologists agreed tentatively but reserved judgment until more comprehensive excavations were conducted at the site. Such a project is to begin this summer under the direction of Dr. Gallivan, Dr. Turner and others, including representatives of Indian communities in the region.

"The excavations began after the owners of the land in Gloucester County, Bob and Lynn Ripley, began finding pieces of pottery and arrowheads scattered on or near the surface of their plowed fields. They alerted local archaeologists, who followed up with more systematic surveys over a site now estimated to be at least 35 acres. They dug test pits at close intervals over the entire site.

"The blue glass beads that excavators found were in the style of 17th century English goods. In the first harsh winter of the Jamestown colony, Captain Smith, its leader, reported trading such beads to the Indians in return for much-needed corn.

"One important objective of this summer's research will be to find some evidence of structures that stood in the village. Powhatan's people were known to live in wigwams made of saplings.

"Dr. Gallivan said the focus of research would be on Powhatan and his capital village of Werowocomoco, not his daughter Pocahontas. No one expects to learn the truth of the John Smith story.

"As the captain laid his head on a sacrificial stone, all hope gone, Pocahontas supposedly rushed in and gave his head a protective embrace. She begged her father to spare him, which he did. Many historians doubt that this happened. Smith himself never mentioned it in his writings until 1624.

"In 1616, after her marriage to John Rolfe, Pocahontas and her husband visited England. Just before she was to sail for home, the Indian princess contracted smallpox and died."

Top Auction Houses Sell Looted Art

"Top auction houses sell looted art, claims Howells," read the headline for Colin Brown and Catherine Milner's May 25 story in The Daily Telegraph published in London.

"Kim Howells, the culture minister," the story began, "is accusing Britain's leading auction houses of trading in looted antiquities and demanding that they do more to ensure the provenance of objects they sell.

"Mr Howells, who caused uproar last week when he accused American film stars of being too 'terrified' to fly to Europe, has now infuriated British auctioneers and art dealers with a suggestion that they could be supporting the trade in stolen goods, even if they do so unwittingly.

"A new Bill, which is going through Parliament with Government support, will make it a criminal offence to deal in cultural objects knowing that they have been stolen or looted. Mr Howells, however, told The Sunday Telegraph that concerted action was still required from dealers and auctioneers to stamp out the trade in looted art and antiquities.

"'We know that some of the most famous sales outlets in the country have been involved, whether knowing or unknowingly,' he said. 'It is time that they got their act together to make sure they are not unwittingly part of organised crime. Fortunes have been made in London by gangsters dealing in art objects stolen from some of the poorest countries on earth. It is time we stopped this illicit trade and protected the good name of art dealers.'

"The suggestion by Mr Howells, Labour's most outspoken minister, caused an outcry from art dealers and traders. John Newgas, the chief executive of Lapada, Britain's largest art and antiques trade association, said: "Dealers here are not corrupt and money laundering is almost non-existent. I think a lot of people will be offended.'

"Anthony Browne, the chairman of the British Art Market Federation, which covers some of the world-renowned dealers in London including Christie's and Sotheby's, said: 'I am surprised Kim Howells has said that. If he has evidence for what he says, that is fine. But the evidence for the scale of this illicit market is terribly thin. These are wild statements, but one just wants to see evidence.'

"Mr Browne, who advised the Government on the new legislation, added: 'We wholeheartedly support the aim of this Bill but it is very important that we draw a clear distinction between people who are behaving in a criminal way and the legitimate art market, which employs nearly 40,000 people and contributes to the British economy.'

"Three years ago, a report by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research alleged that between 60 and 75 per cent of antiquities offered for sale in London auctions had no published provenance - and therefore were almost certainly illegally excavated and smuggled from, among other places Iraq, Italy, India, Cyprus, Crete or Egypt.

"The suggestion that leading auction houses could have been caught up in trading in looted antiquities brought sharp responses from both Christie's and Sotheby's. A Sotheby's spokesman said: 'We no longer sell antiquities in London. All items in Sotheby's catalogues are checked with the Art Loss Register against their database for stolen art.'

"A statement from Christie's added: 'We are surprised by Mr Howells's comments in view of the fact that the Government has been highly supportive of the art market in the UK. Christie's fully supports the aims of the new Bill, which are to stamp out criminal activity that can damage the reputation of the market as a whole. We do not sell any work of art that we have reason to believe has been stolen and go to great lengths to avoid doing so.'

"Under the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Bill, dealers who know or believe that a cultural object is 'tainted' face up to seven years imprisonment. The Bill has passed its committee stage in the Commons without amendment and could become law by the autumn.

"Ministers regard the Bill as central to a crackdown on the trade in looted antiquities which was highlighted by the ransacking of the Iraqi national museum in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

"Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, will fly to Iraq within weeks to study the extent of the looting of artifacts. Her department is also planning to bring Iraqi officials to Britain to be trained how to preserve artifacts and set up a database of looted items.

"Mr Howells last year also courted controversy when he branded modern art as 'bullshit' and last week he said that although Hollywood stars portrayed 'action heroes,' they lacked 'the balls' to fly to Europe in the wake of international terrorist attacks."

A Lost Patrimony Comes Home

On May 25, the headline for David Coleman's New York Times story was "A Lost Patrimony Comes Home." Colman's story described an ironic and not ironic appreciation of African art.

"Beautiful, sure, but what is it worth?" the story began.

"The question rings of the philistine, of the odious art collector, say, who buys only on the speculation that the work of artist X will rise Y percent in value in Z years. But the question is also germane to that clever cadre of conceptual artists whose puckish artworks often ask why an artwork is worth anything at all.

"Few modern artists have toyed with the concept as pointedly as Fred Wilson, who is representing the United States in the 50th Venice Biennale, which opens June 15. In the past, Mr. Wilson has created mock installations of African artifacts that cock an eyebrow at the place African culture assumes in the art hierarchy. He has also taken aim at those who collect tchotchkes, appropriating cartoonish black figurines from the 1930s and 40s and disfiguring or reconfiguring them, thus detracting from their value as collectibles while adding to their value as art.

"Mr. Wilson's incisive humor about the politics of acquisition extends to his own décor. In the crammed-to-the-rafters East Village loft he shares with his companion, the artist Whitfield Lovell, the two men have assembled quite a jumble - collections of sculptured hands, stuffed birds, curiously packaged soap from other lands - all arrayed artlessly, pell-mell, on every wall and tabletop in sight. But in what might be said to be pride of place - atop Mr. Wilson's dresser - sit three terra-cotta vessels that fire his imagination most of all.

"Now, as a personal ethic, Mr. Wilson, who has spent time in Ghana in the 1970s learning primitive craft technique, collects only African art and artifacts made today and in current use. Ordinarily he shuns antiquities - believing, he said, that cultural patrimony is best left where it is found - and anything made for the tourist trade, as many African masks now are.

"But last fall, when he walked into Folklorica, a tribal arts gallery on East 53rd Street in Manhattan, and saw the delicate vases with almost classical Greek lines and found that he could afford them (they were $200 each), he got stung. Excavated in the last decade in Niger, the elegant vessels are held to be relics of the Bura culture and date between the 7th and 11th centuries A.D. "'They spoke to me,' he said. 'It just struck me: How often does one get to commune with something so ancient that has a relationship to who you are?'

"As for opening himself up to criticism, Mr. Wilson recalled that he was once quoted as saying that while he did not approve of collecting African antiquities, he could not be sure what he would do if he had the money to buy them. In the end, he justified the purchase.

"'I feel like I am bringing them home,' he said. 'They've been so severed from their context, they're no longer related to any history, which is such a metaphor for African-Americans themselves.'

"And speaking of relative worth, Reynold C. Kerr, an African arts appraiser and curator, pointed out that the Western market for such antiquities has stopped destruction of the pieces. 'When the monetary value of these things goes up,' Mr. Kerr said, 'it ensures their preservation.'

"Something for collectors to bear in mind - for what it's worth."

Clichés Aside, Indians Were Cowpokes, Too

"Clichés Aside, Indians Were Cowpokes, Too" was the headline for Grace Glueck's May 30 New York Times review of a show at the National Museum of the American Indian

"Can a cowboy be an Indian, or vice versa? Happens all the time," writes Glueck. "Like most stereotypes," she continues, "the one that distinguishes between cowboys and Indians doesn't always work. There are cowboys and there are Indians, but more than occasionally they are one and the same.

"This fact is made abundantly clear in 'Legends of Our Times: Native Ranching and Rodeo Life on the Plains and the Plateau,' at the National Museum of the American Indian, a show that depicts native peoples not as objects of exploitation but as ranchers, cowboys, entertainers and rodeo performers in their own right.

"Organized by the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, this fully packed presentation displays more than 700 objects - saddles, bead and quill works, paintings, photographs, blankets, clothing, horse gear, hunting implements, roundup equipment, spurs, headdresses and other ceremonial garb - from the 18th century to now.

"In printed texts, the show also presents stories, legends and personal reminiscences, altogether giving a lively account, over the last two centuries, of man, woman and horse among the native peoples in western reaches of the United States and Canada.

"Before the white man came, these tribes - among them the Nez Percé, Pawnee, Northern Cheyenne, Sioux and Crow - had countless generations of experience, as the show reminds us, in controlling herds of buffalo and deer training, breeding and riding horses and tracking the land that was their traditional territory.

"As their power waned, their vast preserves were taken over and they themselves were packed off into reserved lands. But some began to adapt to the entrepreneurial ways of the white settlers. "They became cowboys, ranchers and scouts staged rodeos and Wild West shows worked in Hollywood westerns and made cowboy gear, jewelry and other accessories for use by their peers. (At least half of this humongous show is devoted to the rodeo and its exploits.)

"For starters in the show, there is the horse and its fancy but useful trappings: saddles, saddlebags, blankets, bridles, spurs, cruppers, martingales, even a knockout Kutenai beaded cradle board - the aboriginal car seat - for carrying a baby on the saddle. Plains and Plateau people took a great deal of pride in the appearance of their mounts, and a full-size mock steed - a Blackfoot woman's horse - at the show's entrance displays many of these accouterments. (Examples are also shown in separate cases throughout the show.)

"Among its other adornments, the horse - obviously dressed for a parade - sports an 1880 Nez Percé 'medicine horse' mask of red cloth with elaborate beadwork designs, a Blackfoot crupper (a strap and ties that keep the saddle from moving forward), saddle and saddlebag, and a long shawl around its neck elaborately decorated with colored beadwork and tiny silver balls.

"'You respected your horses - you relied on them with your life,' a tribesman known as Mike Bruised Head from Standoff, Alberta, is quoted as saying. 'They took you to war, on the hunt, on scouting expeditions, and you expected your horse to bring you home.'

"Around the mock mount are many examples of horse imagery. One is a dance stick - an effigy used in dances that might memorialize a special horse, like the long, stylized carving in polished wood of a head and hoof, hung with a row of beads and feathers, done in 1996 by a Nueta-Hidatsa-Lakota artist, Dennis R. Fox Jr.

"Horse symbols, emblems and replicas, in fact, pervade the show, from tiny renditions of the animals on baskets, saddlebags and beaded purses to a 'live' painting (one of the few most are photographic reproductions): 'There's More to a Horse Than Meets the Eye' (1995). A vivid but not very artful mixed-media collage of a painted horse head, photographs and other scraps by a Canadian tribesman, George Littlefield, it honors his great-grandfather, who used his large herd of horses in healing ceremonies.

"An especially appealing aspect of the show is its array of human clothing and adornment, from a dashing outfit representative of the embroidered and fringed hide coat and pants - with glass beads and embroidery - that a tribal buffalo hunter would have worn in the mid-1800s, to angora chaps for ranch duty and a queenly Plains Cree dress, circa 1840, of elk hide theatrically fringed from the shoulders to the bustline with porcupine quills.

"One hide shirt from a tribe known as Thompson - of plain buckskin, with a laced open throat and fringed arms and sides - tells of a hunter's experience. On it is drawn a dog chasing a running deer, showing that the animal escaped, while above this vignette are two deer heads, representing the hunter's kills.

"And there seems to be no end of marvelously beaded and quill-worked items, like the stunning Kutenai man's leather vest, circa 1900, on whose white ground beads make geometric designs in blue and green, edged with brown and an entire case full of parfleche (rawhide, with the hair removed by soaking) containers, storage bags for everything from clothes to dried meat and berries, also sporting beaded geometrics. They date from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s.

"But this only begins to hint at the show's many wonderful objects, a mix of old and new set out in such profusion as to boggle the eye, and even encompassing mundanities like lassos, ropes, belts and a camp cookware collection for use along the trail. It's a bedazzlement, but some pruning might have been in order. Do we really need to see a group of veterinary supplies?

"In the rodeo section of the show, wall texts point out that Indian horse-breaking competitions took place for many generations before the phenomenon known as rodeo began, and that they remain different from non-native performances. Indian participants say they are far closer to their steeds and acknowledge the horses' superiority, beginning each event with a Cowboy Prayer asking the animals to have pity on their riders.

"Because Indian cowboys felt discrimination from white judges, separate Indian rodeo associations have sprung up, among them five Native Plains and Plateau rodeo associations in Canada and more than 20 in the United States. In addition to performances, they have extensive training programs for children and young adults.

"Ranging from a group of mannequins wearing colorful rodeo costumes to many photographs of rodeo and Wild West stars in full and strenuous action (lots of them work or have worked in the movie industry), the rodeo section provides an engaging and comprehensive account of the sport. But be warned: perusing it demands more time and patience than non-rodeo fans might be willing to spare."

Nelson-Atkins Museum Reinstalls Native Artworks

"Nelson reinstalls native artworks" was the headline of Alice Thorson's story in the Kansas City Star on June 8, 2003.

"Three years from now," the story began, "the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's department of American Indian art will more than double its display space with a move to the 3,000-square-foot Parker-Grant Gallery on the museum's second floor.

"But Gaylord Torrence, who signed on 16 months ago as the Nelson's curator of American Indian art, is not waiting until then to showcase his treasures, including top examples from a recent bequest of works from Donald D. 'Casey' Jones.

"On June 3, Torrence unveiled a major reinstallation of the museum's existing gallery of American Indian art on the third floor. The new display features 65 pieces, many of which have not been exhibited before.

"'What I wanted to do,' Torrence said in a recent interview, 'was bring forward 65 works that are of masterwork quality.'

"Since his arrival in Kansas City, Torrence has spent countless hours combing the permanent collection, meeting with collectors and seeking out works for purchase.

"One-third of the objects in the reinstalled gallery were borrowed from local collectors another third comes from the Donald D. Jones bequest and recent acquisitions through the Donald D. Jones Fund for American Indian Art. The rest are permanent collection works, most drawn from storage, and recent gifts.

"'Kansas City has a long history with American Indian art,' Torrence said, 'probably beginning with it being at the eastern end of the Santa Fe Trail. During the 19th century, many tribes had reservations in this area some still do. Additionally area collectors have maintained a strong interest in objects from the Midwest made prior to European contact, and some important dealers in historic material were located in Lawrence and Topeka.'

"The Nelson, he noted, established itself internationally as a key player in the field with its landmark 1976-77 'Sacred Circles' exhibit of American Indian art. The show of nearly 700 objects included many rare and important works, including pieces from European collections that had never been exhibited in the United States.

"Works in the reinstalled gallery range from 2,500 B.C. to the present and include two archaic ceremonial flint blades found near Sedalia, Mo.

"Among the five contemporary pieces on view is a model totem pole, lent by Morton and Estelle Sosland, carved from a soft black stone called argillite by the late Northwest carver Bill Reid (1920-1998).

"'I've never seen an argillite carving that has such extraordinary intricacy and complexity,' Torrence enthused.

"His goal, he said, with both the historic and contemporary works, is 'to present the genius of the individual American Indian artist.'

"'This is not about describing cultures. This has to do with the genius of individual works,' he explained. 'These things embody the culture, but they also transcend it and deal with issues of the human spirit.'

"Other objects loaned by local collectors include a 16th-century Mississippian head pot lent by the Stein Family Collection, a sublime Pomo basket from the Hartman Collection and a Comanche shield and cover from the collection of Ed and Judy Benson.

"Made of quarter-inch thick rawhide and bordered with dangling feathers, the shield offered both practical and spiritual protection. It could stop an arrow and deflect a bullet, but it also had sacred powers by virtue of a painted image hidden behind the feathers. The exhibit features a color photograph of the hidden image displayed beside the shield.

"'These people are all passionate about their objects,' Torrence said, 'and many are truly experts in their own right. It's been one of the greatest pleasures in coming here.'

"Permanent collection storage yielded such highlights as a magnificent feathered headdress from the Northern Cheyenne and a ceramic storage jar from Cochiti or Santa Domingo Pueblo. Torrence also chose a Lakota 'Pictographic Dress,' made of muslin and painted with scenes of military exploits, on long-term loan from Conception Abbey.

"'There are pieces I've known about, but in really examining them, I'm even more impressed,' he said. His review of the permanent collection also produced a thrilling -- but embarrassing -- discovery.

"In the months preceding Torrence's decision to take the Nelson curator position, a rare Navajo first phase chief's blanket -- which Torrence labels 'among the greatest achievements of Native American art of all time' -- turned up on the 'Antiques Road Show.'

"Torrence called Donald Ellis, a leading dealer in American Indian art who often appears on the show, and asked, 'If you acquire this blanket, would you give me first refusal on behalf of the Nelson?'

Ellis agreed.

Two weeks after he arrived in Kansas City, Torrence was stunned to find that the Nelson already owned a first phase chief's blanket.

"'I'd never seen it on view, it was never published. It had not been exhibited since the 1970s. It was a great discovery for me.'

"He called Ellis to say, 'We don't need two.'

"The reinstalled collection occupies a newly tranquil setting designed by Rebecca Young, the museum's manager of exhibition design.

"Young dispensed with the gallery's 'visually busy' scheme of varying colors, fabrics and case styles, in favor of a 'more quiet atmosphere.' The cases are now a uniform light tan, which blends with the existing linen wall covering. She removed some of the cases and replaced them with painted panels that key off the architecture and proportions of the room.

"'We're designers, but our job is to be invisible,' she explained. 'We tried to reinforce what was here in a quiet manner.'

"Now the objects make first claim on the attention. Eighteen of them come from the bequest of Casey Jones, an editor of The Kansas City Times for more than 20 years and a former reader representative for The Star.

"'He was a passionate and thoughtful collector,' said Torrence, who got to know Jones in the 1990s. Items on display from the Jones bequest include a Sioux 'Bear effigy club' (circa 1870), two beautiful Northwest Coast masks, a toy cradle by leading contemporary beadworker Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty, and what Torrence labels a 'brilliant' Acoma jar painted with figures of animals and geometric designs.

"The Jones Fund for American Indian Art made possible the recent acquisition of a Lakota courting flute, an Eskimo bow drill and a Kickapoo prayer stick. It also helped support the acquisition of three gifts from the Svacina family: a Mesquakie sash and pair of beaded cuffs and an Ojibwa bandolier bag.

"Adding to this infusion of largesse are three Pueblo pottery vessels recently given to the museum by former trustee Jack Morgan, a Kansas City business and civic leader. They include a rhythmically ribbed 'Melon Jar' by master potter Helen Shupla (1928-1984), from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico. It's breathtaking.

"With the reinstallation under his belt, Torrence is feeling the pressure to build the collection for its Parker-Grant debut.

"'It's my plan that many new pieces, including major contemporary works, will be added to the collection as we move toward the Parker-Grant installation,' he said. 'I've got a list.' "

An Adobe Museum of Art

In The Wall Street Journal, Friday June 13, "An Adobe Museum of Art" by Barbara Jepson is datelined Santa Fe.

"I'm standing in the main storage vault of the Indian Arts Research center, surrounded by 4,000 jars, jugs, bowls and other vessels on open shelves," Jepson's story began. "Hanging over the second-story balcony of the wood-beamed, stucco-walled facility are a few of the IARC's nearly 1,000 rare Navajo and Pueblo textiles. Altogether, there are more than 11,000 pieces of pottery, textiles, baskets, Kachina dolls and other ethnographic items made by Native Americans of the Southwest in the superb collection.

"Housed in an adobe building," the story continues, "the IARC is part of the school of American Research, a nonprofit center for advanced studies in anthropology, the humanities and Native American art. Although open to the public via small, guided tours on Fridays at 2 PM, the IARC's primary outreach is to he Native American community. Each year, about 250 tribal elders, artists and students are invited to spend a day viewing the works with Dolly Naranjo, a Santa Clara Pueblo Indian and former educator who is coordinator of the IARC's Native American heritage program. In that role, she is one part cultural cheerleader, one part detective, passing on information that helps the Center better understand how particular objects were used, how certain motifs evolved and to whom specific works may be attributed.

"For example, Ms. Naranjo recalls the nine tribal elders from the Hopi Tewa pueblo in northwestern Arizona who drove about eight hours to see the collection. They pointed out certain bowls made by their ancestors, identifying them by the 'turned out' rim that helped facilitate the making of 'paper bread,' thin rolls of blue cornmeal. Then there were the Navajo visitors from Kaibeto, Ariz., who warned against leaving the skinheads on clay drums because they believe that the spirit of the maker might be trapped inside. The skinheads are now displayed alongside the drums. A keyhole-shaped cutout on the handle of a mug from the 'pre-contact' era (400-1500 A.D., before the Spanish arrived) remains a mystery.

"The pottery is grouped by tribe and historical era. The IARC is short on works from the 'pre-contact' era. For that, and for contemporary work, check the more broadly based collection of the Buchsbaum Gallery at the nearby Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. But the IARC has many imaginative works from the 'historic' period of 1500 to 1800, and is particularly noted for the high caliber of its holdings from 1880 to 1950. After 1880, tourist demand led to the creation of smaller, more cleanly fired, unused pots, as well as the more positive emergence of individual artists like Margaret Tafoya, Lucy Lewis and Maria Martinez. (Most Native American pottery was made by women.)

"Ms. Naranjo showed me one difference between otherwise similar pots by the Acoma and Zia pueblos: the parrots depicted on Acoma vessels have curved beaks the beaks on the Zia parrots are straight. Nor surprisingly, in the drought-prone Southwest, water is a recurring decorative theme. Water serpents, rain, stylized frogs, dragonflies and river men (supernatural figures from Native American cosmology) are frequently portrayed on pottery and textiles. Tribal history played a part as well: because Apaches traveled a lot, their pottery was usually more primitive technically, whereas the Pueblos provided the stability necessary for pottery-making to flower. 'These things were made for home use out of mud and clay,' a short, gracious woman with gray, shoulder-length hair, 'but made beautifully.'

"Those who attend the weekly, one-hour, docent-guided tours aren't allowed to walk down the individual aisles of open pottery stacks as I was - a necessary restriction for safety reasons. (Advance reservations are required. For details and books on the collection, check www.sarweb.org.) The vibrant Navajo and Pueblo textiles on the second floor are, alas, mainly stored in drawers, opened at the docent's discretion. However, the length of the tour may be extended depending on the interest level of the group. A vault with ritual objects is closed to all but IARC staff and those Native Americans qualified to use them in religious ceremonies.

"But these limitations," Jepson' story concludes, "are a small price to pay for the privilege of seeing the objects discussed and held by gloved docents without the usual barrier of protective glass. I hope that it will someday be possible to add more regular tours -- a topic that's under discussion -- and have additional IARC textiles displayed more openly. Although the SAR is reportedly the oldest cultural institution here, it is less well-known than this mountain-ringed city's distinctive opera, chamber music, ethnic museums and food. Such hidden treasures deserve to be seen."

A look at Native Americans' points of view on the Lewis and Clark Centennial

A look at Native Americans' points of view on the Lewis and Clark Centennial, Timothy Egan's June 15 New York Times story was headlined, "2 Centuries Later, a Moment for Indians to Retell the Past" and bore the dateline New Town, N.D.

The story: "Indian Country is a place where people gather in late June to celebrate the day Custer was whipped at Little Big Horn, where cars sometimes run only in reverse and casinos run all night, and where a Nez Percé guide who led Lewis and Clark over the Bitterroot Mountains is remembered by his native name, which means 'Furnishes White Men With Brains.'

"But on the map - be it the road atlas handed out by the state or the statistical one issued by the Census Bureau - the homelands of the first Americans seem to possess little life or magic. Across vast stretches of the northern plains, Indian lands are blank patches, nations within a nation, landlocked islands foreign to most other Americans.

"Certainly, the scars of memory are layered as thick as the dam water that buries so many old Indian villages and sacred sites here. Generations after the scourges of smallpox, war and forced resettlement, much of what a traveler finds in Indian Country is emptiness.

"Still, those looking to find some link across 200 years, to the people whose nations Lewis and Clark passed through, need only peek into daily life on the reservations along the trail from St. Louis to the Pacific.

"Here in New Town, home of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, Amy Mossett has just planted her garden, using seed corn that is the antithesis of genetically engineered agriculture it is the same sweet corn given members of the American expedition to help them through the winter of 1804-05, at their fort just down river. At that time, the Indian urban complex 1,600 miles from the mouth of the Missouri River had more people (about 4,000) than St. Louis or Washington.

"'Indians have the strongest sense of place of anyone in the world,' said Ms. Mossett, a Mandan-Hidatsa who is a scholar on Sacagawea, the young Lemhi Shoshone woman who saved Lewis and Clark from disaster at two points when the expedition was at low ebb. 'Look at me: why would I choose to live in little New Town, North Dakota, when I could live anywhere? It's because we've been a part of the Missouri River for a thousand years.'

"New Town, by its name, raises the question of what happened to Old Town. And this is where the Mandans, who did perhaps more than any other tribe to help Lewis and Clark, turn bitter.

"It was one thing for the tribe to lose 90 percent of its members to smallpox, a disease that did more than the United States Cavalry to wipe out American Indians. But in the mid-20th century, just as the population was rebounding, the federal government built the Garrison Dam. It choked off the Missouri River here and buried 155,000 acres of prime Indian farmland under a reservoir, dividing a tight-knit reservation into five districts. Many tribal members wound up in this community, on higher ground.

"'Some gratitude, huh?' said Frederick Baker, the Mandan-Hidatsa archivist at the tribal museum here. 'One guy I know had his house moved as he was eating dinner. But, hey, we want people to understand our people are alive. Everywhere else in North Dakota, schools are closing and towns are dying. We're growing. We're alive!'

"The Corps of Volunteers for North Western Discovery, as Lewis called the expedition, passed through roughly 50 Indian nations in their journey of nearly 8,000 miles. Some of those tribes were forcibly removed to Oklahoma. Others - including the Chinook, who lived at the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Coast - are today without a homeland, even a tiny reservation.

"The indignities are piled like bleached buffalo bones. Some of the friendliest tribes were later treated the worst. The Nez Percé, who saved the corps from starvation in Idaho, were chased from their treaty-promised homeland and rounded up near the Canadian border in 1877. The Lemhi Shoshone were erased from the land they had lived on for hundreds of years, and lumped with other tribes in the desert of southern Idaho.

"But now as then, big pieces of the trail, particularly in the Dakotas, run through solid Indian Country. These lands hold the bones of Sitting Bull, the great Sioux chief, and of Sacagawea. They contain towns full of heartbreak, where suicide is the No. 1 killer. They also hold prairie grass untouched by the plow, and bison herds roaming free, giving the tribes something to connect pop-culture-jaded teens on the reservation of 2003 to the warriors whose spirit so impressed travelers in 1803.

"This year, even the Blackfeet of Montana, the only nation to lose people in mortal conflict with Lewis and Clark, and the aggressive Teton Sioux of the Plains, have the bicentennial.

"It is time, the Indians say, to tell their own story of Lewis and Clark, an epic about Indians bailing out whites, showing them where to go, what to eat, whom to avoid along the way, and how to get back home in one piece.

"'One reason we're opening our doors to people is because there are so many dumb images of what Indians are like,' said Denelle High Elk of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. 'I was in Monticello in January, for the kickoff of the bicentennial, and the cab driver said to me, "Oh, you're Indian. You people still live in tepees, don't you?"'

"President Thomas Jefferson knew he was sending an expedition through lands populated by people who did not care a whit for lines drawn on maps in Paris or Virginia. But Jefferson, an Enlightenment-age man, had conflicted views of the native people. He thought some Indians could be 'civilized' back East, while others had to be removed to the far Western plains, the continental equivalent of Mars.

"'Jefferson appears both as the scholarly admirer of Indian character, archaeology and language, and the planner of cultural genocide, the architect of the removal policy, the surveyor of the Trail of Tears,' wrote the historian Anthony F. C. Wallace, in his book, 'Jefferson and the Indians: the Tragic Fate of the First Americans.'

"Lewis and Clark had trouble finding Indians at first. The swift plague of smallpox had come before them, and in some places it left a deathly resonance.

"On Aug. 12, 1804, the corps passed the empty village of Tonwantonga, where the once powerful Omahas had lived. Today Nebraska's largest city is named for this tribe, which has a tiny toehold in the state.

"Further north lived the Otoe, who joined the Missouri Tribe about 200 years ago. They were the first Indians to have a council with Lewis and Clark.

"Today the Otoe and the Missouri have vanished from the trail. They can found in distant Oklahoma, where about 1,300 members live near Red Rock. They feel forgotten by history, some members said, left out of the bicentennial.

"But in rummaging through the belongings of a well-traveled tribe, the Otoe found something recently that has electrified historians - two documents written by Meriwether Lewis, which are not in his journal, describing Indians on the middle Missouri.

"'My grandmother kept these in her trunk," said Rhoda Dent, treasurer of the tribe. 'After she died, my cousin found them. It was just phenomenal for us to read them, even though Lewis refers to native people as children.'

"The documents are now in the Oklahoma Museum of History, and curators there say they believe they are authentic.

"The Otoe would like to reconnect to their old homeland. 'We were the first to greet Lewis and Clark, and look what happened to us,' Ms. Dent said.

"Upriver, the expedition met different reactions among the large nations that roamed the Dakota prairie. Among the Yankton Sioux, the men dined at a tidy village on a meal of stewed dog meat - 'good & well-flavored,' as one expedition member described it.

"William Clark described the Yankton Sioux this way: 'Stout bold looking people (the young men hand Sum) and well made. The Warriors are Very much deckerated with porcupin quils & feathers, large legins & mockersons, all with Buffalow roabes of Different colours.'

"The late historian Stephen Ambrose called such descriptions 'pathbreaking ethnology.' But the next encounter, with the Teton Sioux, appears to have been a textbook case of diplomatic blundering.

"The corps showed off its air gun and a magnifying glass, while offering medals and tobacco. The Teton Sioux, unimpressed, wanted something in return for letting these people pass through their lands. At one point guns were drawn, arrows aimed, and the small cannon mounted to the corps' keelboat ready to fire. The standoff ended peacefully after three days, but with both sides steamed.

"Clark never forgot nor forgave. 'They are the vilest miscreants of the savage race and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri,' he wrote of the Teton Sioux.

"The Sioux fought for their lands to the end, helping to defeat Custer, only to be slaughtered at Wounded Knee in 1890. Today the bands of the Great Sioux Nation, as they call themselves, are spread throughout South Dakota, while Jefferson's granite visage is carved near an Indian sacred site in the Badlands.

"They have shown the same fierce spirit in taking hold of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial in their state, despite opposition from some Sioux elders, and some initial snubs from other tribes. The Sioux have organized an intertribal tourism council, and set up a Native American Scenic Byway - 'a journey through the lands of the least known and most misunderstood nations in America,' as the Indians say in a brochure for the road and its highlights.

"'We were entrepreneurs back then,' said Daphne Richards Cook, who lives on the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. 'And we're entrepreneurs now.'

"The reservations are breathtaking, the prairie grass high and green, the towns bursting with one quirky story after another. They are the biggest population centers for hundreds of miles, with 12,000 Indians living on the Cheyenne River Reservation, 11,000 on the Standing Rock, and 4,300 total on the smaller Crow Creek and Lower Brule reservations. One out of every 12 people in South Dakota, population 756,600, is Indian.

"'I call Indian Country the last of the real frontier,"' said Wanda Wells Crowe of the Crow Creek Sioux. 'Take a look - it's not your typical America.'

"The Sioux say they walk a fine line between two worlds. 'A lot of Indians don't want people here,' Ms. Crowe said. 'And in truth, I sometimes wonder myself why I'm doing this, trying to promote Lewis and Clark as a way to tell our story.' Perhaps the greatest cross-cultural mingling on the expedition happened in what is now North Dakota, where the corps wintered just across the river from Mandan and Hidatsa villages. Lewis and Clark spent more time in the area than anywhere else.

"What the natives who descended from those tribes want people to know is that they already had an advanced society when Lewis and Clark arrived. It was a sophisticated agricultural society, with clans and large earth lodges run by women. The Indians shared food, building tips and wives with the newcomers.

"'Jefferson wanted to make Indians into farmer and traders,' Ms. Mossett said between bites of a fajita salad at a restaurant here in New Town. 'But we were already doing all of that. The difference is, we were doing it without slave labor.'

"Of course, the Mandan and Hidatsa captured other Indians in raids, and later adopted them into their culture. That is how Sacagawea came to live with the Mandan and Hidatsa. She joined the corps in the winter, just after giving birth to a boy she would carry across the West and back.

"'In some ways, the Hidatsa thought these guys were a joke,' said Mr. Baker, the museum archivist. 'We saw them as a trading opportunity, but also felt sorry for them. And we joked about their crummy trade items.'

"Farther along the trail, the Nez Percé also pitied the corps. At one point, the explorers might have been killed just after crossing the Continental Divide, but a Nez Percé woman intervened.

"'The expedition owed more to Indian women than either captain ever acknowledged,' Mr. Ambrose wrote in 'Undaunted Courage,' his best-selling account of the voyage. Mr. Ambrose also noted the bitter irony that when the Nez Percé were driven out of their homeland in 1877, among the stragglers were a handful of old men who had been children when Lewis and Clark visited.

"The Nez Percé, alone among American Indian tribes, selectively bred horses, and say they produced the appaloosa. On this bicentennial, the tribe is reviving its horse-breeding registry and language as part of a Lewis and Clark Rediscovery Project.

"A sign on the Weippe Prairie, in Idaho, reads: 'Lewis and Clark Route, First Contact Between Two Cultures.'

"Like the Sioux, the Nez Percé, with 3,296 tribal members today, suffered the indignity of not even being called by their real name. Sioux is a Chippewa word, shortened by the French, which means little snake, or enemy. Nez Percé is also a French misnomer. Tribal members say they did not pierce their noses.

"At the very least, the Nez Percé, like other Indians along the route from the flatlands to the ocean, hope the Lewis and Clark bicentennial will dispel certain myths.

"With the kind of humor found often in Indian Country, the tribe is taking to the revisionist task. After discussing efforts to restore salmon in rivers stapled with government dams, the Nez Percé report on their Web site that 'we also frequent restaurants and eat modern foods.' "

Before California: An Archeologist Looks at Our Earliest Inhabitants

In the San Francisco Chronicle, June 28, David Kippen reviewed "Before California: An Archeologist Looks at Our Earliest Inhabitants" by Brian Fagan (Rowan & Littlefield, 400 pages, $24.95)

Kippen's review begins: "in his fascinating, even topical new look at the archaeology of California, UC Santa Barbara anthropology Professor Brian Fagan gets on our good side from the outset. He knows that most general readers will probably approach his book out of an interest in California, rather than in archaeology. Wisely then, 'Before California' takes early and frequent pains to reassure us that Fagan has far more than potsherds and milling stones on his mind.

"Right from the beginning, the tone is smart and layman-friendly, with parallels to modern California neither forced nor ignored. 'This book is about people, not artifacts . . .' goes one ingratiating paragraph in the first chapter. 'Regrettably, and unnecessarily, California archaeology has been unspectacular, very dry dust indeed. This is also a book about interconnectedness and interdependence, about the challenges of survival in a fractured, demanding landscape, where the sheer unpredictability of rainfall, El Ninos, and drought cycles, to mention only a few events, forced people to live conservatively and worry constantly about hunger.'

"With the great economic dynamo of our state poised to start running down like an underlubricated engine on Tuesday [Editor's note: Tuesday, July 1, was the date California's budget expired with no replacement in sight], what Californian can read about 'the challenges of survival in a fractured, demanding landscape' without feeling right at home? The triumph of Fagan's book lies in demonstrating that our state -- since the fog-shrouded arrival of the first Siberian 'paleo- Indians' roughly 15,000 years ago -- has never been paradise found or lost, but only made.

"There has never been enough California to go around. As Fagan's well- documented accounts of Californian Indian 'overfishing' and 'overhunting' show, our earliest antecedents weren't always paragons of enlightened stewardship. To fetishize them as peaceful, nature-loving flower children is merely to engage in a less justified version of the tribes' own ancestor worship.

"As Fagan argues, the genius of Californian Indians wasn't that they didn't make any mistakes. They made plenty, and often saw their numbers dwindle accordingly. Where they differed from us was in their ability to learn from those mistakes, to adapt to their neighbors and a changing environment in ways that salvaged their future instead of foreclosing it.

"To pick Fagan's evident favorite among California's tribes as an example, 'there was a major change about a thousand years ago, when the Chumash seem to have paused and made dramatic changes in the way they did business with one another. Faced with escalating violence and persistent hunger, perhaps even local population crashes, their leaders seem to have realized that they were all in the same situation, that survival depended not on competition, but enhanced interdependence.'

"California's two largest surviving tribes, the Republicans and the more numerous Democrats -- who have developed a primitive barter economy -- could learn a lot about interdependence from the Chumash. Toward the end, Fagan overdoes his well-warranted regard for the Chumash a bit, calling them 'brilliant' not once but twice. One wonders whether a professor on any UC campus other than the Chumash's native Santa Barbara would wax so breathless in his admiration of them.

"But that's merely a hairline crack in the shapely, well-turned vessel of Fagan's writing. He acknowledges that he hasn't done much fieldwork in California archaeology, only acceded to his colleagues' request that he synthesize their researches for popular consumption. In retrospect, their confidence in his Cambridge-honed explanatory talents appears well placed.

"'Before California' doesn't stint on the minutiae of archaeology -- arrowheads, mortars and pestles, shell-mound content analysis. Anybody irreconcilably science-averse should be forewarned.

"But in between all the obsidian and the acorns, the Fig. 1 and Map 2, the intriguing and well-designed sidebars about archaeologists' past lurks a provocative message about California's survival. It's worth unearthing."

 

Spring_2003

Appeal by antiquities dealer contested US urges criminality of import of illegally exported goods

From The Art Newspaper: The headline of Martha Lufkin's story was "Appeal by antiquities dealer contested US urges criminality of import of illegally exported goods."

The story began: "The US is contesting the appeal by a New York dealer, Frederick Schultz, of his conviction in 2002 under the US National Stolen Property Act (NSPA), which makes it a crime knowingly to import stolen goods, for receiving antiquities claimed by Egypt as state property under Egyptian law.

"Schultz is urging on appeal that antiquities cannot become 'stolen' under US law merely by application of a foreign law that claims to own them. The US contests this, arguing that the lower court properly ruled that the NSPA applied to Schultz's receipt of the Egyptian objects.

"Schultz also maintains that he should have been allowed to argue that he made a 'mistake' of American law, and should have been allowed to introduce into evidence his speech to the American Association of Appraisers in April 1996, in which he said that the US does not recognize foreign patrimony laws. But the government says the 1996 speech shows that Schultz was not mistaken about US law, but simply disagreed with it. Schultz voiced his opposition to foreign patrimony laws in other speeches which the US cites.

"At trial, the judge characterized Schultz's argument of mistaking US law as 'a classic ignorance-of-the-law-type defense, which is not a defense.'

"Schultz is also arguing that the judge wrongly told the jury it could convict him if he consciously avoided learning Egyptian law in order to escape the consequences of the law. To be able to use the 'conscious avoidance' theory, Schultz says, the jury had to be instructed that it had to find that Schultz was aware of a 'high probability' that Egypt had such a law, and the judge did not instruct that. But the US says the overall language of the jury instruction was proper. Further, the US says, it built its case at trial on the theory that Schultz knew Egyptian law, and the jury sent no note during deliberations indicating that it was considering finding Schultz guilty using the conscious avoidance theory.

"The proof that Schultz knew Egyptian law was overwhelming, the US says, citing that Schultz knew that his co-conspirator Tokeley-Parry was afraid of 'end[ing] up in a steamy jail' in Egypt as a result of his activities and had been arrested in England for conduct related to Egyptian antiquities theft. Schultz communicated with Tokeley-Parry 'in Italian and in code so as to conceal the fact they were dealing in Egyptian antiquities from even the fax operator at Tokeley-Parry's hotel,' the government says. And the pair invented 'fictitious old collections' to disguise the objects' recent removal from Egypt, the US says.

"The government also says that the lower court properly allowed others in the art world to testify that they knew Egypt had a law claiming ownership of antiquities."

Judge Hands Gallery Owner Probation

"Judge Hands Gallery Owner Probation," was the headline for the February 13 Santa Fe New Mexican story on Josh Baer's sentencing by Geoff Grammer.

Datelined Albuquerque, Grammer's story began, "A U. S. District judge on Wednesday called the selling of several federally protected Indian artifacts by a Santa Fe gallery owner 'despicable,' but decided not to impose jail time on Joshua Baer.

"Members of Acoma Pueblo called Baer's sentencing a slap in their faces and noted that they might not be able to use again in pueblo ceremonies many of the items he was caught selling during an undercover sting operation.

"'He knowingly did this even though he knew how sacred these items are to our tribe,' said Melvin Juanico, an Acoma Pueblo tribal interpreter. 'Justice wasn't served today. (U. S. District Judge John Conway) must not understand how vital these (items) are to us.'

"Conway sentenced Baer - owner of Joshua Baer & Co. gallery on Marcy Street - to three years of probation and 100 hours of community service and ordered him to pay $675 in court costs.

"'I don't see that putting you in jail would accomplish anything,' Conway said.

"Much of Baer's community service should be spent educating others about the laws he admitted breaking, the judge ordered.

"In September, Baer pleaded guilty 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 undercover operation, conducted in 1999 and 2000, 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.

"Members from Jemez and Acoma pueblos who attended Wednesday's sentencing hearing said outside the courtroom they believe many of the items Baer was caught selling were stolen from their pueblos many years ago - a claim not verified by U. S. Attorney Mary Catherine McCulloch.

"Regardless of how Baer obtained the items - ceremonial headdresses, prayer sticks and other items - many pueblo members expressed concern Wednesday that the artifacts will never be the same.

"'Will they be used again?" asked Ron Charlie, chairman of the Pueblo of Acoma Historical Preservation Board. 'We don't know. Only our elders can say for sure.'

"Jemez Pueblo Gov. Raymond Loretto said it is likely many of the artifacts were altered over the years after they were taken from the tribes. If they were altered, he added, the artifacts won't carry the same spiritual significance.

"The artifacts - held by the prosecutors as evidence until Wednesday's sentencing hearing - will probably be returned to the tribes in coming weeks, prosecutors said.

"Although defense attorney Peter Schoenberg claimed Wednesday that federal investigators had entrapped the financially troubled Baer into selling the items, the attorney said he was pleased with the sentence imposed.

"Conway said in September's plea hearing that he disliked the vagueness of the laws Baer was guilty of breaking. 'There's not one person in a hundred that even knows these laws exist,' Conway said Wednesday.

"However, the judge added, ignorance of the law is no excuse for any gallery owner who conducts business related to the selling or trading of Indian artifacts."

Vincent Price's Daughter Purchasing Dewey Galleries

"Vincent Price's Daughter Purchasing Dewey Galleries," read the headline for Anne Constable's February 21 Santa Fe New Mexican story.

The story began: "One of Santa Fe's premier art galleries specializing in American Indian art is changing hands.

"After more than 26 years, Ray and Judy Dewey are selling their gallery to Victoria Price, a teacher and writer who is the daughter of the late actor Vincent Price.

"The sale of Dewey Galleries, 53 Old Santa Fe Trail, does not affect Owings Dewey Fine Art or Owings Dewey North, which are managed by the Deweys' longtime business partner, Nat Owings.

"Dewey Galleries, founded in 1976, is one of the leading dealers in Indian art and artifacts in the United States. "The gallery was the first in Santa Fe to show the work of American Indian sculptor and jewelry designer Charles Loloma. 'People were lined up around the block,' Ray Dewey said, recalling the 1977 show. He also presented the first major public show of Northern New Mexico tinwork.

"Dewey, who represents the late Apache sculptor Allan Houser in Santa Fe, sold the work of popular jewelers Gail Bird and Yazzie Johnson and collaborated with weaver Ramona Sakiestewa on a series of trade blankets for Pendleton Woolen Mills.

"The gallery, which began selling classic modern furniture by Knoll Inc. and Cassina USA in 1998, has been featured in Architectural Digest magazine and on the television shows Good Morning America and Antiques Roadshow. It won an 'outstanding achievement' award in 1997 from Santa Fe's Friends of Cultural Tourism.

"'It's one of the premier galleries in the world for Southwest material,' said Donna Pierce, former chief curator at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art and curator of Spanish colonial art at the Denver Art Museum. Pierce arranges for museum groups from out of town to visit Dewey Galleries while they are in Santa Fe.

"Ray Dewey has played a high-profile role in the arts community as a Santa Fe Indian Market judge, president of the Museum of New Mexico Foundation and member of the advisory board of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

"Artist Luis Tapia, who has known the couple for more than two decades, said they were a major force in many careers. 'It was a great help in the beginning years,' Tapia said. 'It gives you as an artist more energy to go on.'

"Ray Dewey said the couple plans to continue living in Santa Fe and will open a private investing and consulting office. The gallery, which will continue in the same location on the Plaza, will be known as Price-Dewey Galleries, he said. After 26 years, 'we were looking for someone to pass the legacy on to,' Dewey explained.

"Victoria Price, 40, comes from a family of art lovers. Her father began collecting art when he was about 12 years old, she said. Price's first purchase was a $37.50 Rembrandt etching, which took him three years to pay off. The actor minored in art history at Yale, taught it for a year at Riverdale School in New York and was working on a master's degree in the subject at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London when a friend dared him to audition for a play.

"The visual arts were 'the greatest passion of his life,' Victoria Price said of her father. He bought art but considered himself a caretaker rather than an owner.

"Vincent Price began collecting American Indian art in the 1940s and spent 15 years on the board of the National Arts and Crafts Board. His purchases included textiles, rugs, drawings, pottery, Kachina dolls and a Zuni altarpiece. Besides selling items from time to time, he also donated part of his collection, including 900 pieces, to East Los Angeles College.

"The late actor also had a penchant for large jewelry. He always wore a big Navajo silver-and-turquoise watchband and bought jewelry for his wives (including Victoria Price's mother, Mary, who died in Santa Fe last year), although, she said, 'he wasn't always married to women who could carry it off.'

"At the end of his life, she said, he kept a lock box under his bed that was stuffed to the rim with American Indian jewelry. He would take each piece out, describe when and where he bought it, and sometimes ask his visitors to select something they liked.

"Art was a bond between father and daughter. Victoria Price studied art at Williams College and wrote her thesis on the connection between African art and German expressionism.

"She taught art history at New Mexico Highlands University, worked in the estates department of the New York auction house Christie's and owns a company that handles art-estate sales. She also wrote 'Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography' after his death.

"'The greatest thing I learned about art from my dad is that we see in very limited ways, if that's how we're taught. (But) if we have the opportunity to make larger connections, it really expands our view of the world.'

"Victoria Price is finishing her doctoral dissertation at the University of New Mexico and teaching in a multidisciplinary arts and humanities program she created at the private Philos Learning Center, a job she'll give up to run the gallery.

"Victoria Price said many things will stay the same at the gallery, but her intention is to 'bring in some contemporary artists whom I think will fit well with the look and philosophy of the gallery.' She added she plans to offer some 20th-century iconic art in the form of prints and lower-priced items that tie the elements of the gallery together.

"She met Ray Dewey nearly 20 years ago when she was selling some pieces from her father's art collection. 'He's handing me the baton, but I'm going to run my own race,' she said."

Court blocks study of bones pending appeal

Kennewick Man Update, February 24, 2003

A new story has been posted on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocking study of Kennewick Man until appeals can be heard.

The story, "Court blocks study of bones pending appeal" is at: http://www.kennewick-man.com/news/022103.html copied to http:www.atada.org/2003_court_blocks.html on 2/18/07.

'Lost City' Yielding Its Secrets

"'Lost City' Yielding Its Secrets" was the headline for John Noble Wilford's March 18 story on Machu Picchu in The New York Times.

Datelined New Haven, the story began, "Working with new evidence and a trove of re-examined relics, many of them recovered from the basement of a Yale museum here, archaeologists have revised their thinking about the significance of Machu Picchu, the most famous 'lost city' of the Incas.

"The new interpretation comes more than 90 years after the explorer Hiram Bingham III bushwhacked his way to a high ridge in the Andes of Peru and beheld a dreamscape out of the pre-Columbian past.

"There, set against looming peaks cloaked in snow and wreathed in cloud, was Machu Picchu. Before his eyes, rising from the green undergrowth of neglect, were the imperial stones that have entranced and mystified visitors and scholars alike.

"The expression 'lost city,' popularized by Bingham, was the magical elixir for rundown imaginations. The words evoked the romanticism of exploration and archaeology at the time, in the summer of 1911. And the lanky and vigorous Bingham seemed to personify the spirit that was driving discoveries of a forgotten past, the curiosity and courage to go seeking in remote places, as well as the hardihood to succeed.

"But finding Machu Picchu proved to be easier than solving the mystery of its place in the Inca empire, arguably the richest and most powerful in the New World when Europeans arrived. The imposing architecture attested to the skill and audacity of the Incas. But who had lived at this isolated site and for what purpose?

"Bingham, a historian at Yale, advanced three hypotheses - all of them dead wrong. A revival in research in recent years, experts say, has solved the mystery and, to a large degree, demystified Machu Picchu.

"The spectacular site was not, as Bingham supposed, the traditional birthplace of the Inca people or the final stronghold of the Incas in their losing struggle against Spanish conquest in the 16th century. Nor was it a sacred spiritual center occupied by chosen women, the 'virgins of the sun,' and presided over by priests who worshiped the sun god.

"Instead, Machu Picchu was one of many private estates of the emperor and, in particular, the favored country retreat for the royal family and Inca nobility. It was, archaeologists say, the Inca equivalent of Camp David, albeit on a much grander scale.

"This interpretation and other new research inform a major exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. The show, 'Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas,' will be here until May 3. Then it is to travel to Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Denver, Houston and Chicago.

"Dr. Richard L. Burger, the director of the Peabody and a specialist in Inca archaeology, said the show, the largest on the Incas ever assembled in the United States, would 'change the way people see Machu Picchu.' Dr. Burger and Dr. Lucy C. Salazar, also an archaeologist, are co-curators of the exhibit.

"'Bingham's work was very important in putting Inca archaeology on the map,' said Dr. Burger, who is married to Dr. Salazar. 'But we can now set aside all his ideas about the meaning of the Machu Picchu site.'

"The new interpretation, generally supported by other experts, is based largely on a study of 16th-century Spanish legal documents and a more detailed analysis of pottery, copper and bronze jewelry, tools, dwellings, skeletal remains and other material found in the ruins.

"Many of the artifacts were themselves a forgotten treasure. Shipped back by Bingham, they were stashed in the museum basement, where they remained, still in their original boxes and wrapped in pages of The New York Times from the 1920s, until renewed interest in the Incas led scientists to poke into the stash.

"Until recently, there had not been much scholarly interest in Machu Picchu. Although the site has long been Peru's most popular tourist draw and a mecca for seekers of mystical and spiritual experiences, the haunting shells of temples, palaces and other structures had ceased to attract many archaeologists.

"'A lot of people felt it had become so much an icon for the Inca and Peru,' said Dr. Craig Morris, a specialist in Peruvian archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. 'They became more interested in working in places not so well known.'

"Bingham's long shadow may also have discouraged research. In his three expeditions to Machu Picchu from 1911 to 1915, he established himself as the 'discoverer' and foremost interpreter of the lost city. His 1930 book, 'Machu Picchu: A Citadel of the Incas,' endured as the definitive treatise on the site. His maps and photographs of the ruins were authoritative and evocative.

"But he was untrained in archaeology and he did not conduct systematic excavations and rigorous analysis. 'His excavation notes,' Dr. Burger said, 'included more on what they were eating than what they were finding.'

"Bingham eventually resigned his professorship at Yale to enter politics, becoming lieutenant governor and governor of Connecticut and a senator. But his influence on Inca research remained strong, in part because of his fervid writing style.

"In 'Lost City of the Incas,' a best seller, he wrote: 'Here, concealed in a canyon of remarkable grandeur, protected by nature and by the hand of man, the "Virgins of the Sun" one by one passed away on this beautiful mountain top and left no descendants willing to reveal the importance or explain the significance of the ruins which crown the beetling precipices of Machu Picchu.'

"Archaeologists today forgive some of Bingham's lapses in excavation, but they have destroyed his theories.

"For example, Dr. Salazar's exhaustive examination of pottery contradicted Bingham's speculation that Machu Picchu was somehow associated with the earliest Incas. All the pottery styles were 15th century. That and other evidence suggest that construction on the site began around 1450.

"That was in the reign of Pachacuti, considered the Alexander the Great of the Incas. His creation, like the empire, had a relatively brief history. From the recovered pottery and Spanish documents, scholars estimate that the site was largely abandoned after only 80 years.

"Plague, brought to the New World by Spaniards, had by then left the land in turmoil, and in 1532 the Spanish conquered Peru with little resistance. The few Incan holdouts, including the last emperor, capitulated in 1572 at a tropical valley refuge that bore no resemblance in Spanish descriptions to Machu Picchu. So much for another of Bingham's suppositions.

"His theory about a sanctuary for virgins and priests began to unravel in 1990 with the publication of research by Dr. John Howland Rowe, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley.

"In archives at Cuzco, the former Inca capital, Dr. Rowe found a 16th-century suit filed by descendants of Pachacuti. They sought the return of family lands, including a retreat called Picchu. The finding sent Dr. Burger, a onetime student of Dr. Rowe, and Dr. Salazar back to Machu Picchu.

"'We then felt this was a royal estate, a country palace,' Dr. Burger recalled. 'All Machu Picchu is a big palace, the emperor's residence across from the temple, the dwellings and workshops, everything spread out around a great plaza.'

"As early as the 1960s, María Rostworowski, an ethnohistorian in Lima, pointed out that Inca rulers had established a chain of royal estates through the region. They served as occasional royal residences, but mainly as administrative centers. Many of the estates were razed by Spanish soldiers searching for gold, and some were built over and modified beyond recognition. But remote Machu Picchu, at an elevation of 6,750 feet, survived unscathed.

"Dr. Susan A. Niles, an archaeologist at Lafayette College who is the author of 'The Shape of Inca History,' published in 1999, explained that it has long been known that the estates were peculiar to Inca royalty. Each ruler established his own and built a palace there as a monument to himself.

"Each estate was the ruler's own private property, which was left to his family after death. The succeeding son could use the estates, but not own them. So he immediately began building his own monuments.

"The estates, Dr. Niles said, were important centers for the economic management of agricultural lands, forests and mines in the surrounding region. That was presumably true, as well, of Machu Picchu.

"Dr. Burger and Dr. Salazar agreed, but said little evidence had been found that ordinary administrative affairs were regularly conducted there. They emphasized the role of the site, 50 miles from Cuzco, as a country retreat for entertaining visiting dignitaries and for royal relaxation.

"Though called a 'lost city,' it was not a true city. Probably no more than 750 people ever lived there at any given time, and in the rainy season the population dropped to just a few hundred. They were presumably the servants and artisans who attended to the royal family and their elite guests.

"Bingham was not entirely wrong about the religious aspects of Machu Picchu. The buildings, ritual chambers, fountains and gardens, Dr. Salazar said, seemed to be arranged with Incan cosmology in mind. Rulers were believed to be descended from the sun, and wherever they went was sacred. Pachacuti, in particular, was looked upon as a creator god.

"New investigations turned up bones of animals probably sacrificed in religious ceremonies. And there were dozens of obsidian pebbles, which scientific analysis showed had come from a revered volcano more than 200 miles away. The obsidian had never been modified for use as cutting tools. It is likely, Dr. Burger said, the obsidian had symbolic meaning. The Incas worshiped high mountains as the source of supernatural forces.

"But Bingham had gone too far with his 'virgins of the sun' hypothesis, experts say. He was misled by the findings of the party's osteologist, who reported that most of the skeletons buried at the site were those of women.

"In new studies, Dr. John W. Verano, a physical anthropologist at Tulane University, determined that the ratio of female to male skeletons was comparatively even. His research also showed that many families and newborn infants lived there, not what one would expect in a community of virgins.

"All the burials at the site were simple, with only modest grave goods. These were the remains of the retainers rather than royalty.

"'This mortuary pattern,' Dr. Burger said, 'is not surprising, because if members of the Inca elite had died while residing at the country palace, they would have been transported to their principal residence in Cuzco rather than being buried at Machu Picchu.'

"Life at the country retreat must have been reasonably healthy. An analysis of bones showed that the workers apparently ate well. There were cases of tuberculosis and parasites, as well as considerable tooth decay from the corn diets. But nearly all the burials were of adults, including quite a few who were older than 50, an advanced age in that day.

"The workers were brought from all over the empire, Dr. Verano concluded. The ethnic diversity was seen in the shapes of skulls, which had been deformed through binding in infancy. Different cultures over a wide geographic range had distinctive cranial deformations. Some came from the coast, and others from the highlands and as far away as Lake Titicaca.

"Investigations by Dr. Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, a Peruvian archaeologist, and Kenneth Wright, a hydrological engineer from Boulder, Colo., have uncovered the magnitude of Machu Picchu as an engineering achievement. The Incas had not only terraced the slopes for agriculture, hauling up fine sand and topsoil from the valley and erecting stone retaining walls that have survived more than 500 years. But they had also taken an uneven ridge surface and transformed it to the flat mesalike surface seen today.

"Before any of the buildings rose, the Incas leveled the site with loose rock and other fill, stabilizing it with immense walls deep beneath the surface. Mr. Wright estimates that the invisible subsurface construction constitutes some 60 percent of the effort invested in building Machu Picchu.

"Whatever Pachacuti, the empire builder, had in mind, Dr. Salazar said, Machu Picchu 'shows what the New World had achieved before the Spanish arrived.' Some of the engineering and architecture was better than in Seville, she noted, and the Spanish 'could not believe how people, people without writing, could have built something like this.'

"Archaeologists today may have demystified the lofty ruins, but their awe remains undiminished.

"Dr. Niles of Lafayette College said the 'overpowering landscape alone may be why Pachacuti chose the place for what his legacy to the world should be.'

"Conceding that he was biased, Dr. Morris of the Natural History Museum said that Machu Picchu 'is to me the most spectacular archaeological site in the world.' " "Finding Ghosts in the Mountains" was the headline of Timothy Egan's March 21 New York Times story on thousand-year-old rock art that appeared in Escapes section.

The story began: "Looking at the glut of housing developments and supersized stores flat on the floor of the Sonoran Desert, in southern Arizona, many people say this part of the country has no history, no art, and certainty no antiquity. Not here, there, or anytime before, is the complaint.

"Or they stare at the sandstone walls of the desert - salmon-colored rock shaped by the ages - and shrug, 'Nice, but where's the mystery?'

"The problem is, they don't know where to look. Art, intrigue, sex, entire stone walls of ancient narrative and allure are out here, incised or painted on stone. For the hunter of rock art, the Southwest is never one-dimensional.

"Remote corners of the desert, the hidden hoodoos and unvisited canyons, contain sketches that are easily a thousand years old, or more, and can look as if they were etched yesterday. But some of the best rock art is at the edge of the big cities. Just across the Rio Grande river from Albuquerque, at Petroglyph National Monument, or outside Las Vegas at Red Rock Canyon, or on the edge of Tucson, the rocks are full of dancing, chattering forms.

"I fell for glyphs when I was a kid, growing up in eastern Washington. While fishing on the banks of the Little Spokane River with my little brother, we took a break from the summer sun and ducked under a rock overhang. Leaning against the stone, I looked up and saw what appeared to be feather-headed hunters on horseback, etched onto the basalt, chasing deer or elk. Though barely visible, the image was strong enough that it made the ghosts of the land come alive.

"Later, in travels around the West, I would try when possible to end a day in a rock art gallery. At sunset, the Petroglyph monument near Albuquerque for example, with its 25,000 images, is a glut of stories in stone. Outside Sedona, Ariz., I like the beings that look like a cross between a turtle and a human. For starters, it makes you wonder what turtles were doing in Arizona.

"One day recently I drove just west of Tucson, past the last golf course and minimart, to Saguaro National Park. The park, 91,327 acres of wild Sonoran life, is on two sides of this city. But the best petroglyphs are in the western unit, about a half-hour drive from downtown, and tucked in the folds of the Tucson Mountains.

"The saguaros themselves, the giant, floppy-armed cactuses that are emblematic of this part of the Southwest, are worth the visit. It is hard not to anthropomorphize them. Some look sad and droopy. Others are perky, almost conversational with their sign language. The park takes in two of the biggest saguaro forests in the world.

"The hunt for rock art begins once you're inside the park boundaries. The signs point to a visitor center, picnic perches and trailheads for day hikes, but there is no indication of where to find petroglyphs. Since so many rock art panels have been vandalized, park rangers generally do not publicize these finds. If asked, though, they will tell you.

"A ranger mentioned several spots to me. One, a mile-long hike up a dry wash, would be the hardest to find, he said, but worth it the others were easier to find. Since I like the hunt almost as much as I do the glyphs, I headed for the trail.

"The day was warm and without humidity, a perfect late-winter Sonoran afternoon the city sounds long gone, a slight wind. Rumors of rock art drifted down the trail. An elderly couple in Saharan sun hats said that if I traveled to the base of a waterfall, now dry, and backtracked several hundred yards, I would bump into rocks congested with thousand-year-old scribblings. That set my pulse racing.

"Farther along the trail, I met a note-taking bird-watcher who said there were even better panels high above the cliffs near the dormant waterfall.

"'Look up, and adjust your eyes,' he said. 'It'll come to you.'

"A mile into the trail I found the cliffs and started down the wash, scanning the walls. Nothing. Then, farther down the rocks, the vegetation grew thicker. Palo verde, the green-skinned tree, was all around. Orange poppies blossomed from little holds in the rock, and hummingbirds darted around the flowers like a pack of seventh-graders circling a vending machine.

"Close to the rock, I saw no sign of art. But as I backed away, it revealed itself. Here was a swirl, not quite a coiled snake, but a common geometric design, white on the brown skin of the rock. And nearby was a biped with horns that appeared to be dancing. There was also a star, like a distant planet.

"It takes a little time to adjust your expectations, and eyes, to the art. You have to develop petroglyph eyes, learning to read the rock the way a fisherman reads a riffle on a stream. I backed up farther and looked across the way, about 60 feet, to the other side of the cliff. There I saw a gallery of eternity circles, snakes and lumpy-looking characters with stick arms and stick legs, and those antennas or horns.

"Questions: Who were these guys? What were they trying to say? Is all of this a message, a greeting, a warning?

"The park service is not very helpful on these rock art queries. 'We do not know what these petroglyphs mean,' says a small sign off the road near another site. Give the government credit for clarity and brevity.

"The mystery, to me, is one of the attractions. Who needs a bunch of snooty art reviewers or deconstructionists in black to let the rest of us feel inferior? Out here, it is just the stone and the viewer, the artist and the audience.

"Of course, there are numerous explanations, all of them speculative since the ancients left no catalog details behind. In southern and central Arizona, most of the glyphs are from the Hohokam people, who lived here from A.D. 200 to about 1450, well before European contact, according to the Park Service. The Hohokam built canals and irrigated crops. Life apparently was sweet at times, even without early-bird coupons and air-conditioning. By the time the Jesuits arrived in 1608, the Hohokams were gone, leaving behind thousands of riffs on stone.

"The petroglyphs in this part of Arizona are done in the Hohokam style, in which abstract designs outnumber life forms. These could be solstice markers, decorative motifs or simply graffiti. Most rock art is in places that humans would find appealing - near water, shade, heavy vegetation or a place with a good view. I could imagine these early Arizonans, sated on mesquite bean goulash and jack-rabbit stew, with maybe a side of dried javelina strips, hanging out in the shade of the rock quarry, drawing some impressive anthromorphs.

"Petroglyphs are incised or chiseled onto a patina known as desert varnish. Pictographs are painted. Because Arizona is so arid, the sketches age very slowly. Most Indians who appeared later in the area shunned the ancient rock art. The Spanish called the works piedras pintadas (painted rocks) and were generally unimpressed.

"I walked down the wash, my mind drifting back to a simpler time, found the car and drove to another site in the park. This one was off a dirt road, just a few hundred yards and up on a hill. You could see these sketches from a hundred yards out. From up on the hill, in the distance, I could see modern Tucson spread out just beyond the mountains. Here was a pile of concentrated drawings more than 12 centuries old, a park ranger said, that was undisturbed. One figure appeared to have a penis, or at least a middle leg.

"There was no sign of Kokopelli, the hunchbacked flute player with the Bart Simpson hair, who is ubiquitous in Southwestern rock art. He was perhaps a fertility shaman, or a trickster. He always appears to be leading a Mardi Gras parade.

"Kokopelli is common in many Anasazi sites. I have seen him in deep canyons days away from the nearest road, or on vertical rock near a highway, and all places in between. Of late, he has become the favorite motif of gift shop owners and T-shirt makers. Anasazi has been interpreted to mean either 'ancient enemies' or 'ancient ones,' in the language of the Navajos, who arrived several hundred years after the Anasazi had departed. The Anasazi had, by some estimates, a peak population of 250,000 - a much greater population density than that which exists on the Colorado Plateau today.

"On an earlier rock art trip, I was looking for Anasazi sights in southern Utah, north of the Grand Canyon, on Bureau of Land Management property. The bureau people, like the park rangers, were cagey about where to look. They control an eighth of all the land in the 48 contiguous states, and can often be charmed into giving up some of the secrets. But because of vandalism - rock art thieves have plundered and defaced more than half of all the intact sites, bureau officials say they have to be careful about giving out directions to rock art.

"After some schmoozing, though, they directed me to the hamlet of Boulder, Utah, population 112, in a place that Car and Driver Magazine once rated the most remote spot in the contiguous United States.

"A friend and I went up and down a number of dirt roads, striking out, until we found something promising. Another hiker filled in some blanks. We tramped up a small creek around several bends, dodging rattlesnakes, in search of what I was told would be some impressive glyphs. In late afternoon, sitting on a rock and trying to rehydrate, we were ready to give up. My friend pointed to a distant red wall.

"We walked up to a dead-end, in a semicircular canyon, and saw one of the most impressive petroglyphs I had ever seen. It was of three people holding hands, on a rock wall about the size of a movie screen. They had triangular upper bodies, a feature of the Anasazi late-basketmaker period, about 1,500 years ago, and, of course, antennas or horns on their heads. The image changed as the light slipped away. We stayed until dusk, renewed again by the unknown."

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