"If the Ark of the Covenant from Indiana Jones was anywhere, it would be here"

 

A few years ago, a colleague and I were in Washington D.C. for a grant meeting. Between grant meetings, Census trainings and library meetings, I have had the good fortune to travel there many times over the past two decades. The days of mandated grant funded trips to the funding agency may be over in the post-Covid era. There is really no reason that a large percentage of those meetings couldn't be done via Zoom or other platforms, saving the taxpayer a few thousand dollars per person for flight and hotel. 

During one of the meetings, I coordinated a side trip to visit the Smithsonian's Museum Support center to get a tour from Dr. David Hunt, a collections manager at the site to view a collection of cast busts made from living American Indians in the early 20th century, that now sit collecting dust. Many of the busts were the ancestors of people I knew, so checking into them was something I felt was important to see what further steps might be taken in the future toward access.

The story started several years before when I was contacted by a man named Larry Taylor, who had done extensive research and has published a detailed book that catalogs each of the busts. The self published book is an an invaluable guide. Unfortunately, it is not widely available, though Sitting Bull College Library has a copy. I last saw Larry when he stopped by the library in the fall of 2016 on his way to the Sacred Stone camp with a load of supplies.

Larry and his wife Evelyn, an Osage descendant of one of the men who's image was cast, were the engines behind bringing about awareness of these lost piece's of history.  Smithsonian Magazine published a detailed piece about their important journey, so I won't repeat it here. The Taylor's have been great evangelists, contacting people across the country to raise awareness.

A visit to the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center, with its vast and diverse collections, feels very much like the iconic final scene in the first Indiana Jones film, where the crate holding the Ark is fork-lifted into an endless, cavernous warehouse. During our visit, the staff joked with us that if that "if Indiana Jones Ark of the Covenant was anywhere, it would be here".  About 54 million items, 40 percent of the Smithsonian's total collections are stored there. It is easy to see how even significant items could get lost. The actual facility, with heavy lumberyard style shelving stretching several stories into the sky is much more impressive. On shelves just like one might see at Home Depot, we saw a ship from ancient Egypt and so many other items that it was surreal. The juxtaposition of ancient things and the relatively modern side by side on big box store shelving is something that will always stick with me. We got a tour from the people who's job it is to custom make supports for artifacts to fit and be moved on and off shelving. Quite possibly the most interesting job on earth, a mix of historian, mechanic, craftsman and artist. If only I had one more life to live.

We rode the D.C. Metro to Suitland, Maryland and walked to the MSC nearby. I had been there many times before, because the Census Bureau offices are there as well. I had also been there in 2005 to the National Museum of the American Indian Cultural Resources Center which is right next to the MSC. As tribal college librarians, we received a tour of the CRC, while having our meetings at the brand new museum on the National Mall. The collections of the CRC are jaw dropping. Artifact storage drawers stretch several stories upward and building sized totem poles stood along the walls. I am sure now that it has been open for another 15 years it is even more impressive.

At the MSC, Dr. Hunt took us back into an area of grey storage drawers and into a small, back room. Packed into the room were dozens of busts. The busts were made from a combination of face casts and photographs that accompanied them. The sculptor had traveled to various Indian nations to make these busts from living people. The early 1900s was a weird and racist time for anthropology and the busts were part of that. Ugly past aside, their value now is that they are exacting physical images of people's ancestors. Future possibilities for these busts, many from tribes in the Dakotas, remain up in the air. It would be great to see replicas made, similar to those made of the Osage busts, that could return to their tribal home.

One of the casts was the face of a youthful George Bushotter. Bushotter later went on to work with the anthropologist James Owen Dorsey to record 3,500 pages of written Lakota. The Smithsonian got so tired of my squeaky wheel filling the ears of anyone that would listen that those vital Lakota resources were inaccessible to those who need it, they digitized them. Maybe I am too full of myself, but anyway, they got digitized. They put them online for public access, in addition to giving large format files to the Lakota/Dakota tribal colleges. I humbly thank whomever was responsible for moving them to the top of a long digitization list and securing grant funding to get it done. I wrote more about the writings on the SBC Library blog a few years back. Before they were digitized, I had been looking into writing a grant to scan them at a government cost of several hundred dollars per page.  This was before high quality digital photography became ubiquitous in the post iPhone era. My struggles seem prosaic now in an age when digitization is as easy as turning a page and pushing a button. Now, anyone with a cell phone or pocket camera can photograph thousands of pages in an afternoon.