From time to time, The Repatriation Files will revisit great books from the past that were on the vanguard of the movement to repatriate human remains and objects of cultural patrimony. This week’s review looks back at Robin Ridington and Dennis Hasting’s “Blessing for a Long Time,” a study of the Peabody Museum’s return of the Sacred Pole to the Omaha Nation.
In 1997, when Robin Ridington and Omaha historian Dennis Hastings collaboratively authored Blessing for a Long Time (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), anthropology was experiencing the growing pains associated with NAGPRA.
Besides struggling with how to implement the law, ethnographers increasingly sought new ways of recording and reporting the cultural history of Native peoples more commensurate with the spirit of tribal empowerment that had spurred the legislation. This involved a thoughtful abandonment of an older ethnographic style that reported information from indigenous “informants,” replacing it with a collaborative method in which Native peoples and communities became “consultants.” First and foremost, many ethnographers began to seek input from the tribes themselves on how ethnography might best serve contemporary communities.
Blessing for a Long Time engaged with this new anthropological mandate by relating a multi-layered story of how an “object of cultural patrimony” was lost and then returned. Ridington and Hastings blended oral histories with archival research to explain the significance of a ceremonial wooden pole called Umon’hon’ti (“the real Omaha”), how it ended up at the Peabody, and why it had to be returned to its Nebraska homeland.
The Lodge of the White Buffalo Robe.
The Omaha Sacred Pole at the center of their account is one of the Omaha Nation’s most honored ceremonial objects, along with the White Buffalo Robe.
He is, in many ways, a humble being. About six feet long, and topped with a ceremonial scalp lock, Umon’hon’ti has lashed to his lower extremity a short stick called zhi’be, representing his leg. At his middle, he is adorned with a wicker basket filled with heron down. Throughout his life in the Omaha nation, he lived in a special lodge, with a caretaker from the Hon’ga clan. Every year, the community visited his lodge to thank him for his steadfast protection of the Omaha people in a ceremony of renewal.
Ridington and Hastings tell the story of the Venerable Man’s alienation and repatriation by weaving together the many stories that are associated with him, paying special attention to the way he represented a lived embodiment of the Omaha Nation:
The son of an Omaha chief long ago read the object that was to become the Sacred Pole as “a wonderful tree.” His father read the same object as “a tree that stands burning.” The older man understood it as [occupying] a sacred place where “the Thunder birds come and go . . . making a trail of fire that leaves four paths on the burnt grass that stretch toward the Four Winds.”
Francis Laflesche
Ridington and Hastings supplement this traditional account told by Yellow Smoke in 1880s with the interpretation of the story of the Sacred Pole that appears in the Twenty Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnography, produced by the Euro-American ethnographer Alice Fletcher and her Omaha consulting ethnographer, Francis LaFlesche: “Fletcher and LaFlesche read the same object as the relic of a past once so full of activity and hope.'”
As a member of the Omaha Nation, however, Laflesche was so concerned with Umon’hon’ti’s well being in what he considered the Omaha Nation’s final days, that he convinced its last caretaker, Yellow Smoke, to “sell” it to him for safekeeping at the Peabody.
In the intervening years between the ethnographers’ pronouncement of the death of Omaha traditions and the return of Umon’hon’ti, the Sacred Pole had stood firm as a guide for cultural survival, even if he resided in a museum at Harvard University. Ridington and Hastings asked their own readers to “think of Umon’hon’ti as a person who has accumulated many stories in his long life,” inviting them to join in reading some of those stories “in his very appearance” today. “If people continue to come to Umon’hon’ti in the right mind,” the tell their readers, “they may be gifted with his blessing for a long time to come.
Blessing for a Long Time reads nothing like an old style ethnographic or archaeological report. Its authors’ conceived of it as one of Umon’hon’ti’s stories, offering both the Omaha and non-Indian readers a blessing of reconciliation. The book reproduces Omaha renewal songs on many of its pages, breaking up passages of ethnology written in the nineteenth century with the words and feelings of Omahas from contemporary times.
Hastings and Ridington work hard to produce a book that doesn’t take sides on the issue of whether LaFlesche was right in convincing Yellow Smoke to give up the Sacred Pole. They simply report that community members at the time of their writing continued to consider LaFlesche a manipulative agent of outsiders who wanted to get their hands on Indian sacred objects at any costs. Ridington and Hastings, however, tell a more nuanced story. In what is one of the book’s most poignant moments, they reproduce LaFlesche’s memory of seeing Umon’hon’ti in his lodge for the last time:
There, in the place of honor stood my friend, the ‘Venerable Man,’ leaning aslant as I saw him years before when I carried to him the large offering of choice meat. He had served a great purpose, although lacking the power of speech, or any of the faculties with which man is gifted, he kept closely cemented the Seven Chiefs and the gentes of the tribe for hundreds of years. He was the object of reverence of young and old. When the United States government had become indebted to the tribe for lands sold, he, too, was accounted as one of the creditors and paid the same as a man of flesh and blood. He now stood before us, abadoned by all save his last Keeper, who was now bowed with age. The Keeper seemed even to be a part of him, bearing the name “Smoked Yellow,” a name both referring to the age and the accumulated smoke upon the Pole.
A little while later, LaFlesche convinced Smoked Yellow to let him take the Venerable Man to the Peabody, where he bided his time until his 1989 return to the Omaha Nation. In this clip from Nebraska Public Televisions “The Return of the Sacred Pole,” one can witness the emotions of that day of his return: