In the Field Museum’s new exhibition “Apsáalooke Women and Warriors,” the story of one Native American people, more widely known as the Crow of the northwest plains, is told by members of the community.
And it includes not just objects from the Apsáalooke (ahp-SAH-luh-guh) past and pictures of the departed but also the work of living artists and photos of living people, a reminder that the Crow people aren’t relics of history but part of a continuing story.
In this way, in addition to being a vibrant exhibition rich in artwork and community lore, the show portends a future for the Field, which is in the midst of updating its woefully outdated but object-rich Native American galleries for unveiling next year.
In the more immediate future, the exhibition was to open Friday — as of this writing, at midday Thursday — and the museum had not changed its hours or admission policies in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“To have a major show of this size and importance curated by a Native American woman is pretty significant for us,” said Alaka Wali, the museum’s curator of North American anthropology. It is the Field’s “first large-scale exhibition curated by a Native American scholar in collaboration with their community,” the museum says.
“We’ve really benefited enormously from the depth of knowledge these people brought to the artifacts,” said Richard Lariviere, the museum’s CEO. “I’m kind of a Plains Indian aficionado, and it’s a much richer experience to see these objects through the lens of what the owners bring to them.”
The curator is Nina Sanders, an Apsáalooke woman based in the southwest who connected with the Field through her work with the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium and its more-than-decade-long Open Fields project covering topics related to indigenous rights and culture.
A sister exhibition of the same title is being mounted in the Neubauer’s much smaller space on the Hyde Park campus. The collegium’s intimate gallery is reimagined as the inside of a tipi, a domestic space featuring a sacred war shield, a war shirt, and horse regalia, plus artworks by some of the same contemporary Crow artists featured in the Field Museum show.
Sanders and Wali, along with two UChicago faculty members, make up the Open Fields research team.
“In working in museums, I’ve seen all these different objects that I thought, ‘Oh my God, if I ever curated an exhibition, I would have this in this show and this is what I would say about it,'” Sanders said recently, during a break from the process of installing the exhibit at the Field. “And so the exhibition was almost already sort of created within me, and it wasn’t difficult to pitch something.”
There is so much to catch the eye in the Field exhibition, from historical beadwork to contemporary regalia for a horse to a massive sculpture, throbbing red, of “male and female bodies, back to back, with all genders in between,” in the words of the artist Ben Pease.
Pease, in the work’s label, says it was a response to seeing “a sculpture in Chicago of a generalized Indian with stereotyped and inaccurate regalia on.”
But the exhibition, beginning with the Crow creation story, really builds to two climaxes. One is in the final room, showcasing contemporary Apsáalooke art and design, especially clothing.
And right before that, on display for the first time ever, are some of the museum’s collection of Crow war shields, gathered, the label explains, in the first years of the 20th Century, by a museum collector “paid to go onto the reservation and buy whatever they could because it was believed that Native Americans would be extinct,” Sanders said.
That enduring myth of the “vanishing Indian” is one Sanders said she hopes the exhibition aims to obliterate.
Another key for her was to make clear to visitors that each object isn’t just an example of a people’s cultural production, but rather a specific object with “an intimate narrative.”
She pointed to the war bonnet nearby in a display case. In the traditional museum approach “it would say, you know, ‘This war bonnet would be traditionally worn by a chief who had counted coup, and it’s made of rawhide, eagle feathers, beads,” she said. Counting coup is performing an act of bravery against an enemy.
“But now the way it’s written it’s an actual story about how the person got the war bonnet, or how it was made, who it was made by and what it meant to that person. … We try to have conversations through the label text with people so that they feel like there’s an Apsáalooke person there with them and having a conversation with them.”
“We’re trying to escape,” she said, “the stereotype that, you know, all Indians are like this or all Indians are like that.”
Walking through the galleries during a preview Tuesday was a powerful experience for some of the Crow artists whose work was on display.
“This isn’t us, yesterday,” said Adam Sings In The Timber, whose suite of photos of contemporary Crow women is on display. “It’s us, yesterday, today and tomorrow. It’s who we are as a people. I mean, it’s so, so Crow. It’s not even just a Native American thing. It’s specifically a Crow people thing.”
Coming to the gallery with the war shields was the most powerful part for him, he said, an almost visceral connection to his people as he described it. But the whole show gives him hope for better representation in the future.
“I hope it’s a way for other museums, other anthropologists, to collaborate more closely with the people that they’re sort of displaying,” he said. “A Crow woman worked on this. Crow people contributed to this. And it’s just so much better for that.”
sajohnson@chicagotribne.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
