A recent acquaintance from the Wind River Reservation, Reinette Tendore, shared with me her community’s efforts to build a museum to house repatriated artifacts. I got to know Reinette and her husband, Lee, at the recent Newberry Library Consortium in American Indian Studies workshop. Reinette is a member of the Northern Arapaho Nation, who share Wind River with the Eastern Shoshoni Nation. The two nations haven’t always gotten along—in fact, they are not traditionally associated with the same location in pre-reservation times. Lee tells me the Northern Arapaho were living near Estes Park, Colorado when the reservation was formed. Over the years, however, relations between the two tribes have changed for the better. In fact, Reinette’s husband is Shoshoni and they are raising their daughter to understand both tribal histories.
When I told her about “The Repatriation Files,” she said she had just the film for me. “Lived History: The Story of the Wind River Virtual Museum” was produced in 2013 by Wind River community members for Wyoming PBS to tell the story of their visit to the Field Museum in Chicago, where they were given access to objects of cultural patrimony. (see “Lived History”)
“Lived History”
In the film, elders from both nations describe and comment on the making and use of objects that the filmmakers then digitized as part of a virtual archive to be used by the Wind River residents to strengthen their ties with the past, tradition, and history.
An important factor in the health of indigenous communities is the complex relationship that obtains between their languages and material culture. You really can’t have one without the other. Here again, the situation at Wind River is especially difficult. Eastern Shoshoni people speak a language based in the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family and Northern Arapaho is an Algonquian tongue. Reinette’s nation has somewhere between 250 and 1000 speakers. Her husband’s Shoshoni relatives can boast of similar numbers of speakers, but perhaps only a couple of hundred people over 50 could be considered fluent. Still, the Eastern Shoshoni at Wind River have embarked on a successful language revitalization program, and more and more children are learning the language.
So, as the people of Wind River work hard to maintain their languages, they also have begun to rekindle a long-standing dream—building a center of shared cultural patrimony on the reservation to serve as a repository of knowledge for the generations to come.
The film ends poignantly, with the elders on the bus ride home through the Wyoming plains, pondering questions about repatriation. The late Robert Goggles expresses the central tension involved in repatriation: “The articles [in the museum] belong to my ancestors. They should be taken back and put somewhere so that (some of them), we could make use of them. Some of them, we can’t use them and we’ll take them out and bury them . . . [I have] mixed emotions, you might say. Cause with me, its not alright with me.”
For now, the Wind River community has a virtual archive of these objects, filmed in three dimensions, from every angle, now digitized and available to the reservation’s teachers and students for consultation as they go about the work of reviving their languages and re-connected with the material cultures that supported them.
Reinette tells me that another film is out about Wind River and should be available for viewing in a few months: “Here is the trailer that is now out. It is still premiering in places across the U.S. and should be out by the end of this year for all to watch. The trailer is really good and makes us all excited to see. https://vimeo.com/135290295
