Museum Collections Class Notes

Cultural and Archaeological ANTH 2301 Museum Collections The majority of the items gathered by anthropologists during the salvage anthropological era were placed in university archives and museums. Nowadays, a lot of natural history museums include big dioramas with the artefacts from many different tribes. Manuscripts and ethnographies are kept in large collections at museum research libraries. Large collections of human remains may be found in many museums; archaeologists have also added to these collections. Native Americans have taken issue with these collections, particularly with the harvesting of human remains, which they consider to be sacrilegious. Millions of sets of human remains—mostly single bones, but some complete skeletons—are currently housed in museum repositories; it's possible that many sets will never be examined. Early on, anthropologists had little time for studying or analysing their finds since they were too busy gathering. After the anthropologists who had assembled the collections went on to another project or died, many of them were placed in storage. Millions of physical artefacts and ethnographic documents exist today that have never been thoroughly examined. Anthropologists and Indigenous peoples alike can do study with these stored resources. Indigenous peoples are using these collections to help regain aspects of their traditions that were lost over the last 200 years as a result of assimilation efforts. Linguistic anthropologist Henry Zenk is one individual who has utilised these archives. Zenk has dedicated years of research to the languages and customs of the Chinook, Kalapuya, and Molalla tribes in western Oregon. In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked as a research assistant for the Grand Ronde tribe, where he learned the trading language of the Chinuk Wawa, which is spoken by tribes from southern Alaska to northern California and even as far east as Montana. He has spent over thirty years instructing in the language at the Grand Ronde Reservation. Along with being an authority on the languages of the Kalapuya tribes of the Willamette and Umpqua Valleys, he started translating the Melville Jacobs Kalapuya notes in 2013. From 1928 until his passing in 1971, Melville Jacobs, an anthropologist from the University of Washington, researched the languages of the Northwest Coast. His extensive research on the languages of the peoples of western Oregon, with a particular emphasis on Kalapuya, filled more than 100 field notes. In 1945, Jacobs released Kalapuya Texts, a compilation of Kalapuya oral histories. Additionally, he collaborated with John Hudson, a Kalapuya speaker, to translate a number of works written by former anthropologists Leonard Frachtenberg and Albert Gatschet. Some of these previously collected works were translated by Jacobs and Hudson; however, many remained untranslated at the time of Hudson's death in 1953. Zenk and colleague Jedd Schrock spent many years studying Kalapuya before translating a collection of Jacobs notes that contained information on the background and knowledge of a Kalapuya man named Louis Kenoyer. My Life, by Louis Kenoyer: Reminiscences of a Grand Ronde Reservation Childhood was released in 2017 by Zenk & Schrock. The work of Zenk and Schrock is a superb illustration of the study opportunities provided by the body of prior anthropologists' work. For this project, Zenk collaborated extensively with the Grand Ronde tribe, making every effort to ensure that the tribe's members would gain from the translation of Kenoyer's tale by having a deeper understanding of their own past. Over the course of 50 years, he conducted research and worked closely with Grand Ronde tribe members. His doctoral study, for example, required a great deal of work with Grand Ronde people, who at the time were not a federally recognised tribe. Zenk started assisting the tribe in the 1990s to educate its members Chinuk Wawa. The tribe is currently teaching young people the language through a comprehensive language immersion effort. As a scholar, master-apprentice instructor, advisor, and teacher, Zenk has consistently had an impact. The tribe has been able to reclaim portions of their history and culture that had been lost for many years because to Zenk's efforts.