MUSEUM news 64 TUNIIT Cambridge, UK—A rare group of exquisite small sculptures some 1,000 years old are on display until April 2016 in the Micro Gallery of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. They were created by a pre-Inuit people now known as the Dorset Culture (AD 500–1500). These people are identifi ed by many contemporary Inuit as Tuniit, mythic giants recalled as early inhabitants of present-day Igloolik in the northeastern Canadian territory of Nunavut. The miniature human fi gures, polar bears, caribou, walruses, and birds may have been used as amulets in a world dominated by spirits and mediated by shamans. These sculptures were painstakingly carved in walrus ivory and caribou antler using fl aked fl int blades or rare knives with meteoric iron blades, an example of which is also on display. The Cambridge collection originates from an encounter between an Inuit group, French missionary Father Etienne Bazin, and Graham Rowley in the 1930s. The latter, a Cambridge-trained archaeologist, visited the Inuit area where Fr. Bazin had established a mission in 1936. The local Inuit had found ancient artifacts as they dug turf for their winter houses, and Bazin had formed a collection of these. Having formed a friendship, he gave 400 examples, including the ivories on display here, to Rowley. The anthropologist excavated an additional 1,500 artifacts in 1939, and his entire collection was donated to Cambridge in 1950. Tuniit: Arctic Giants and Ivory Miniatures is complemented by an early twentieth-century woman’s parka, amauti, with a hood to hold a child, skillfully tailored from sections of caribou skin. It was collected in Nunavut by Diamond Jenness, the archaeologist who fi rst identifi ed the Dorset Culture in the 1920s. RIGHT: Man carrying a child. Dorset, Nunavut, Canada. AD 500–1500. Collected and donated by Graham Rowley. Walrus ivory. H: 5 cm. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, inv. 1950.405. REMEMBERING LITTLE BIGHORN Tulsa—On June 25, 1876, Lakota and Cheyenne warriors overwhelmed General George A. Custer and the 7th Cavalry on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in present-day Montana. This event is legendary in US history, but Native perspectives on the battle are less well known. Lakota artists Stephen Standing Bear (c. 1859–1933) and Amos Bad Heart Bull (c. 1868–1913), though young, were both present at the battle, and each later recorded his experiences in drawings using traditional pictographs rendered in pencil and ink on cloth and paper. Bad Heart Bull, in particular, was a historian of the Oglala Lakota, as his father had been before him. Unfortunately, his ledger book, which contained many of his drawings, was buried with his sister, who had inherited it from him, upon her death. However, before they were lost, many of the images from this book had been photographed and subsequently published in 1938 in Hartley Burr Alexander’s Sioux Indian Painting. Images by both men form the basis of First Person: Remembering Little Bighorn, which will be on display at the Philbrook Museum of Art May 11–November 20, 2016. The installation will feature a large drawing on muslin by Standing Bear and images of drawings by Bad Heart Bull from recently restored glass-plate negatives preserved in the Smithsonian Institution. These illustrations, both large and small, are rare and detailed eyewitness accounts of a signifi cant event in US and Native American history. Curated by Christina E. Burke, the exhibition will bring a rare Native perspective to famous events that took place 140 years ago. ABOVE AND BELOW: Stephen Standing Bear (Oglala Lakota, c. 1859–1933), Battle of the Little Bighorn (full image and details), c. 1920s. Pencil and ink on muslin. Philbrook Museum of Art, inv. 1981.35; gift of Mrs. John Zink.
•TribalPaginaIntera.indd
To see the actual publication please follow the link above