History tends to be made up of the things left behind; stories, physical items, buildings, those are the pieces used to craft the narratives that explain human history at its core. With that, the information available about some items can be overwhelming — like the entirety of the history of the Mona Lisa and how it came to be — or it can be depressingly underwhelming. The items I chose to include in the Omeka Items List were a silver and turquoise bracelet attributed to the Diné (Navajo) nation in the Southeastern United States, and a map depicting the land cessions by different Native nations within the state of Illinois, completed in 1899. For the bracelet, very very little information was available to me through the Museum of the American Indian (MAI) website. The most information it included was who donated the bracelet, when they thought it originated from, which nation they thought it belonged to, and the physical characteristics of the bracelet itself. All of that is all well and good, but it’s frustratingly vague. The only people that the bracelet can be attributed to are the Diné nation itself, the MAI, or Mrs Ester Applebaum Leavy – who donated the piece to the museum. It gives insight into what materials are available to the Diné people and the type of adornment they craft for themselves or to sell, but that’s about it. All that’s known about the bracelet (based on the information on the MAI website) is that it’s a bracelet from around the 1960s that was assumedly crafted by someone from the Diné nation. The map of cessions has much more information available about it – like who made it, when it was made, what each section refers to, what information it specifically contains, where the map can be found in the Library of Congress, and more. For me, the question that immediately came to mind after looking at these pieces to type up the Dublin Core was why can I find so much information about this map from 1899 about the land cessions in Illinois, but almost nothing about this beautiful bracelet from the 1960s, over half a century closer in time. Of course the obvious answers arise, that the bracelet may have been stolen or it was found, or it had been purchased from a Diné artisan. All of that is spectacular, but credit should be given to the artist who painstakingly crafted the bracelet itself, not the woman who happened to donate it to the museum.
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Annemarie– This post really walks through the thinking process behind sources as “data” and their relationship to the production of history. There are so many sources (particularly those created by Europeans or Euro-Americans) that have huge catalogue records about their metadata (and directly affect our knowledge about those items). Conversely, items created by other cultures or marginalized ethnic groups, including Indigenous communities, usually contain very little information about the origin story of the item. As you suggest, this is often the byproduct of unethical means of an item’s acquisition, and many items were simply stolen from their Indigenous creators/owners.
The comparison drawn between the 1960s bracelet and the 1899 map are great examples of these issues, and the general lack of care/interest in Indigenous-produced items. It is truly unfortunate that there isn’t more information available about the bracelet and its origin story. It must have been important to someone. It also makes me wonder about whether museums/archives intentionally leave this information vague; meaning that if they were to find the rightful creators/owners could potentially mean repatriating it back to the community from their collections.