BEYOND HOLBROOK: NEARBY COUNTIES, COMMON ORIGINS

This museum is not unique; in fact, I would argue that strikingly similar depictions of the local past could be found in collections across the region, if not the country. Consider, for instance, other Arizona museums such as the Apache County Historical Society Museum in St. Johns, the Graham County Historical Museum in Thatcher, and the Eastern Arizona Museum and Historical Society of Graham County in Pima (see Figure 1). These museums are all located in small towns in counties with similar demographics: they are among the poorest of Arizona’s counties, are sparsely populated, have high unemployment rates, and include or are adjacent to Indian reservations. Each of these museums was the work of local residents of primarily Anglo and LDS origins with long-standing ties to the area. The historical societies in charge of them are dominated by people of the same backgrounds. Strong connections to local political structures were necessary to secure initial funding and are needed for continued support. They are staffed largely by volunteers. Collections were secured locally, principally by donations, and include many items of the founders’ ancestors, such as quilts, old tools, and vehicles. Not surprisingly, the past celebrated in these collections is strikingly similar to that of the Navajo County Museum.

The Apache County Historical Museum in St. Johns is a case in point. Sponsored by the St. Johns Rotary Club in 1973, it is widely known as the under- taking of Mr. and Mrs. Dewey Farr, descendants of an early LDS family.27 Dewey Farr explained his connec- tion to this project:

From the lips of my father and mother, and many other early settlers of the late 1870s or early 1880s, I have listened to experiences and historical incidents which deeply impressed me. Their courage and determination to succeed, in the face of diversities and trials [sic], made history which needed to be preserved. So after being given the position of “President,” Mrs. Farr and I have spent most of our time, and all our “whiskey” money in organizing, collecting funds, and building this beautiful museum.²⁸

As in the Holbrook example, preserving a defunct historical structure was the impetus for this project—in this case, the structure was an old log cabin that belonged to the Farr family, who also provided the land for the museum complex.²⁹ Since the cabin was too small to hold the collection, a new structure was commissioned and funded by a grant of $126,000 from the Environmental Development Agency and $32,000 from local families.³⁰

The spatial organization of the collection is similar to that of Holbrook, with an initial focus on the town of St. Johns with a series of historical photos of the town in yesteryear and a scale model of the town center (rather than a focus on the county as a whole), followed by a roughly chronological display of what I label “Prehistory,” “Hispano” history, and “Pioneer” history. On two occasions, display cases exhibit prehistoric fossils immediately adjacent to indigenous artifacts. While the Hispanic presence in the area is granted more attention here than in Holbrook (represented by an exhibit on the “First families of San Juan”), imagery found in a central diorama undermines this effort. This diorama features four displays of ethnic group histories that include Indian figurines hiding behind rocks before arriving Spanish conquistadors, Mormon settlers standing upright with hoes working the land, Navajo lounging on the ground near their hogans while sheep graze nearby, and “Hispano” shepherds represented by a sleeping figurine wearing a giant sombrero.

The preeminence of settler artifacts in this collection again reveals the settler as principal protagonist of local history. Even more than the Holbrook museum, the Apache County Historical Museum could be viewed as part elaborate family shrine. Several display cases feature the artifacts, portraits, and family history narratives of the town’s prominent LDS and Anglo families, organized by family, with ancestors’ former possessions such as quilts, canes, and a pewter serving set displayed alongside their portraits and genealogical information. An employee of the St. Johns Chamber of Commerce, which helps staff the historical museum, explained that the Farrs “looked far and wide for items,” and added that they “needed to be the long-term, well-established family that they were to get so much material, as they had to twist the arms of a lot of folks to get them to donate.”

As in Holbrook, Anglo individuals dominate the collection in other ways: settler artifacts are usually identified by ancestor or descendant, while Indian artifacts are often of unknown provenance. Sometimes artifacts of the same type, such as pottery shards, have been organized in some symmetrical pattern and framed. If they were associated with any one individual by name, it would be the Anglo person who found them, framed them, and donated them to the collec- tion.Wefind a similar situation in the Eastern Arizona Museum in Pima that has an “Indian Room” filled with a “large sampling of southwestern artifacts, such as pots, bowls, axes, knives, grinding stones, paint pal- lets and such, with most coming from the local area.”³¹

Each of these collections had idiosyncratic beginnings, usually rooted in a serendipitous conjuncture of energetic local personalities, available space, resources, and objects. The Graham County Historical Museum has been based at a vacated local school but will have to move shortly when the school board reclaims this space.³² The Eastern Arizona Museum is located in an abandoned bank that had been in the founders’ family, in the tiny town of Pima, Arizona. One of its founders told me the collection started almost by accident:

What started it was this, we had this guy, and he retired, had a stroke. He wasn’t a real people person, but he had a Jeep, and he would travel all around and collect a lot of Indian artifacts. He needed a place to store it—his wife finally said she didn’t want it in the house. My husband was into archaeology, so that’s how they got started. At first, our record keeping wasn’t the best. People would bring things in, and I’d write it down.³³

The fact that these museums were established by descendants of the local Anglo elite helps explain the rather unselfconscious settler orientation of the exhibits and the concomitant downplaying of other local histories. However, the label “county” museum, and the fact that these museums secure funding from county coffers and state-wide historical societies, gives the uninformed visitor the impression that these exhibits are county-sanctioned, or at least aim to document county-wide pasts.

EVOLUTION AND THE SETTLER-COLONIAL PAST

Deborah Bird Rose asks how it is that we “new world” settler peoples come to imagine that we belong to our beloved homelands: “We cannot help but know that we are here through dispossession and death. What are some of the stories we tell to help us inscribe a moral presence in places we have come to through violence?” (2006:228). I have tried to show some of these stories here. In these historical museums, Indians are presented as if they were from the remote past, or even part of the natural world, with their material objects located next to dinosaur remains. The message is that while they may have lived right here, they are now gone. By the time “we” arrived, “they” were living on reservations carrying out traditional occupations. The towns owe their existence to the early Anglo “pioneers” who brought commerce and civilization, and whose descendants continue to hold positions of power. Yet, this is clearly not the whole story. In Holbrook, it neglects so much, including a fascinating Hispano–Anglo rivalry and a continued indigenous presence that has been reduced to prison drawings.

Couldn’t one argue that this is the only way to organize the local past in this part of the country? It is time to revisit the evolutionary exhibitionary paradigm in light of our discussion of settler colonialism. As noted, one of its distinctive features is its positing that all of humanity evolves along a similar track, with “primitive” contemporaries representing people stuck in earlier stages. Historian Steven Conn (2006:94) has described this as a distinction in chronometers, with Native Americans existing in a “natural time” like animal species or geological formations. Scholars have criticized the paradigm’s racism, its Eurocentrism, and the fact that Native Americans are not treated as equals. Mark Leone and Barbara Little for instance, write that most “modern Americans don’t see natural history museums as pessimistic or imprisoning, but Native Americans do as in them they see themselves ranked below modern Western human beings” (2004:372). Yes, the relegation of Indians to the past is problematic on so many levels, and a subhuman ranking has multiple, lasting effects. What Leone and Little and other critics neglect to explore (but which their work surely anticipates) is the ways the evolutionary trope is especially necessary for narrating the past in an ongoing settler colonial society.

Not only does the evolutionary model relegate peoples to different human races or types, or to different chronometers altogether, conjuring up notions of indigenous extinction, but it also allows us to imagine the progression of populations as an orderly succession rather than emphasizing the violence of their actual collision. As part of settler colonialism’s “logic of elimination,” it works to screen from view the messy era of conquest that culminated in the dispossession of the area’s original inhabitants, a saga that would certainly make some visitors uncomfortable. The “other” people are removed so that their artifacts become simply the stuff that “we” found when “we” arrived. Thus, the narrators of what Leone and Little refer to as an “Anglo-American way of categorizing the world” are not only Anglos but also, more specifically, settlers, and it is assumed that the museum audience will be too (Leone and Little 2004:394). In the American Southwest, the Hispanic settlement history is particularly problematic, for it threatens to call into question the entire narrative thrust, and at least in this part of Arizona, it is kept at the margins.

Wolfe (1999) observes that Aboriginal and European societies in Australia are depicted as occupying discontinuous spheres, either different eras altogether or wholly different places. The images of Aboriginality that figure most prominently are those that “least conflict with settler-colonial economics” (Wolfe 1999:180). We find a strikingly similar pattern in many Arizona museums, with romantic paintings of “traditional” Indians found alongside stories of heroic Indian killers, such as Sheriff Owens, who helped eliminate whatever economic competition existed when Anglos were first arriving to the scene. The relegation of the Indian off-stage or to a precivilization lifeway is necessary to grant these towns moral legitimacy. Moreover, local people that would blur social categories and thus call into question the implied evolutionary model, such as “Indian cowboys,” contemporary Apache or Navajo citizens, or the town’s early Hispanic entrepreneur-founders, such as Montaño, remain off-stage.

The ubiquity of the evolutionary exhibitionary model in the United States has been shaped by not only the nation’s settler colonial heritage but also a generalized denial of this heritage today. Such a perspective is not limited to smaller, poorly funded public history operations, but persists, even in profes- sional historiography (Adas 2001; Colwell-Chantha- phonh 2007:3–4; Kaplan 1993:17; Tyrell 2009:544).

WHAT IS A MUSEUM TO DO?

Were curators in these rural, economically depressed counties purposefully trying to construct a “settler- colonial”museum or trying to alienate non-Anglo visitors? Certainly not. By all accounts, Garnett Franklin, the force behind the Holbrook museum, sacrificed years of her life to communicate her love of the past to outside and local visitors through not only the museum but also in regular newspaper columns on local history and by speaking to school classes in the area. In many ways, she has fulfilled Schlereth’s agenda for the history museum: she has spent much of her life’s energy trying to show “the average citizen” ways of “knowing themselves and their communities through an understanding of their own past” (2004:344). But, we must ask, “which citizen” and “which past”?

Museum founders certainly had family members in mind: the exhibits that include ancestors’ treasured possessions and portraits, held on loan and accompanied by lengthy genealogies, are understandably geared toward their surviving relatives living locally or visiting periodically from afar. In this regard, the museums play a role parallel to those Native American museums found on the nearby reservations that have adopted a predominant in-group focus and pedagogical mission (Hoerig 2010:70).

More difficult to address is the fact that the imagined audience includes tourists. Tourist dollars are especially important motivators when small towns anywhere face economic decline. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett reminds us, “Heritage adds value to existing assets that have either ceased to be viable (subsistence lifestyles, obsolete technologies, abandoned mines, the evidence of past disasters) or that never were economically productive because an area is too hot, too cold, too wet, or too remote or that operate outside the realm of profit” (1998:150).

While I would never argue that the local historical society held merely a utilitarian regard for the local past, it is clear that Franklin also hoped to see her town prosper and was aware of the powerful draw of the “mythic Old West” in the American imagination. In an article about the museum that appeared in 1990, Franklin states, “travelers from the East are usually awed by Holbrook’s history. Visitors can view the sheriff’s office and almost feel the warmth from the old pot-bellied stove or hear the jingle of spurs as the deputies come in from looking for rustlers on a cross country ride” (Fox 1990). She continues, “we see the appreciative looks of the public, who often feel as though they have just rediscovered the West, and feel firsthand the life the early settlers of the area lived,” adding as almost an afterthought, “local citizens are encouraged to visit the museum too” (Fox 1990).

These passages suggest a specific audience for the exhibits—faceless “Easterners” seeking the mythic West (Nash 1991). One imagines that these museum founders developed collections in part in reaction to the perceived demands of tourists, who, like the founders, held particular expectations for the “Old West” shaped by TV westerns, historical novels, and 19th- century understandings of the frontier (DeLyser 1999:610). What is crucial here is the presumption that this audience will share a settler orientation on this past as well. This is perhaps more apparent when we consider these museums’ location in counties that also host large Indian reservations. In fact, at the Holbrook museum, the native peoples a visitor is most likely to encounter are those hired to dance in the museum grounds for tourists during the summer months.

Given these problems and dilemmas, what direction should our local museums take? In his discussion of historical consciousness, Peter Seixas writes of the need to consider “value commitments”: in part to contribute to “public-policy applications,” scholars of historical consciousness “must accept the burden of normative judgments: different forms of historical consciousness are supported by and, in turn, promote different social and political arrangements” (2004:10–11). Referencing “high levels of migration,” he writes that some “forms of historical consciousness that may have been acceptable for relatively homogenous cultures pose obstacles to the negotiation of inter-group relations and adaptation to rapid change that characterize postmodern global culture” (Seixas 2004:11). The problem here, however, is not one of adding another layer of multivocality due to new waves of immigrants or a diversifying society; it is not simply a matter of opening up the museum to other forms of historical consciousness, but it is more intractable. The fact that systematic steps were not taken to involve represented communities in the initial exhibition planning reveals much about the settler colonial legacy of this country, which has included mild to extreme racial prejudice as well as structural racism, especially in border communities, unequal power sharing within the towns in question, and a general marginalization of local native and Hispanic community members. A temporary solution would be to rename these museums to more accurately reflect their settler focus. The more difficult challenge is to find some way to step outside the settler orientation altogether and present a story that people—of all backgrounds—will want to come to see. For, when one people’s triumph is another people’s tragedy, what kind of shared narrative is possible, and how might it be expressed?

In conclusion, the dedicated museum founders and directors may have recognized the potential of these collections in bringing added value and, hopefully, income to the coffers of their economically depressed towns. However, by appealing to their imagined (non-Indian, non-Hispanic) visitor, they ended up communicating hegemonic understandings of the national past and local society. In an effort to present a local historical narrative to the “average [settler] citizen,” they helped foster and perpetuate a settler-colonial historical consciousness.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Versions of this paper were presented at the conference Language, Ideology and Semiotics, May 2009, at the Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, and the panel The Ends of Settler Studies: Settler Colonialism and Nostalgic Anthropology at the 2009 Annual Meet- ing of the American Anthropological Association. Many thanks to conference and panel organizers Heidi Orcutt- Gachiri and Tamara Neuman. The present version was strengthened by comments from William Abruzzi, Alli- son Alexy, Anna Eisenstein, and anonymous reviewers as well as the editors and editorial manager of Museum Anthropology. Research was conducted while I was scho- lar at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Iowa. I thank Jay Semel and the center staff for support throughout my stay there and Lafayette College for the research leave that made this work possible. Research assistance was graciously provided by Liang Zhang and Brooke Kohler.