Native past preserved for future
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BY JOE DUGGAN/Lincoln Journal Star
OMAHA — Two people, separated by decades, ponder the same moccasin.
One, likely a woman, used glass beads to create a colorful mosaic that turned plain leather into something of value, something worth saving.
Did she live 100 years ago? What did she witness of the unyielding assault on her people? Did she fear her skills, passed down through generations, would end with her?
The moccasin offers no answers, only more questions for Rebecca Cashman, an assistant conservator with the Nebraska State Historical Society.
It rests on a table in the objects laboratory of the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center in Omaha. Nearby are the conservator’s tools: tweezers, needles, thread, tissue-thin paper and dropper bottles containing solvents and adhesives.
For decades, the moccasin was stored on a basement shelf at the Museum of Nebraska History in Lincoln. Time and wear have unraveled a bit of sinew, freeing perhaps a couple of dozen beads hardly bigger than mustard seeds.
Cashman tries to figure out how to put them back where the unknown artisan originally placed them.
A maddening puzzle perhaps, but it fascinates her. Artifact conservation provides a nexus for Cashman’s training in history, chemistry and art.
She is on a team working to conserve and catalog Nebraska’s collection of roughly 3,300 Native artifacts. The project, which started in January, will take two years and will cost close to half a million dollars.
The project will not only preserve the artifacts, but also will provide expanded and safer storage of them. And that’s a responsibility the Historical Society believes goes to the heart of its mission, said Deborah Long, objects curator at the Ford Center.
“These have to stay here forever,” she said. “We have to save them forever.”
11 Native nations
The collection includes artifacts attributed to some of the most famous names in Native history — Red Cloud, Standing Bear, Black Elk, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Susette LaFleche Tibbles.
It consists of objects from 11 Native nations, including the Ponca, Pawnee, Santee, Omaha, Winnebago, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Lakota.
The weaponry, tools, clothing and crafts reflect the beauty, diversity and craftsmanship of Native peoples. The collection includes arrows, pipes, headdresses, robes, jewelry, bags and even sewing kits adorned with a dazzling array of beadwork.
The collection’s size and scope also makes it nationally significant to researchers, historians and others interested in Native history.
For example, it includes a headdress Standing Bear presented to his lawyer at the conclusion of the trial that recognized Natives as people in the eyes of the law. It also includes objects linked to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, which left dead some 370 Lakota men, women and children at the hands of U.S. soldiers.
The society acquired most of the collection in the early 1900s, some items through purchase but most via donation, said Deb Arenz, senior museum curator.
The original collectors included Charles Zimmerman, a physician in Boyd County who gathered more than 300 Native artifacts in his lifetime. Another was D. Charles Bristol, who exhibited his collection in a traveling show known as “Omaha Charley and His Wandering Band of Sioux.”
It’s difficult to know whether the collectors saw the objects as cultural relics from persecuted people they admired or trophies taken from the despised.
“These people didn’t write down their motives,” Arenz said.
Some of the collection’s finest examples are on long-term display in the First Nebraskans exhibit at the Museum of Nebraska History. But many more have been stored in the museum’s basement at 15th and P streets.
That’s where the conservation project begins.
New preservation methods
Two more women in white lab coats and nitrile gloves are up to their ears in foot leather.
The state collection includes 232 pairs of moccasins. Jessica Waite and Tina Koeppe will handle every one before their work is through.
In a lab in the museum basement, they are in the long process of inspecting, researching and photographing all Native objects currently in storage.
They send artifacts in bad shape to the Ford Center, but Waite, a conservation technician, performs minor repairs herself. Koeppe, a collections technician, inputs a photo and all available information about each object into a new computer database, which will make the collection more accessible to researchers, and eventually, the public.
Their work also involves coming up with storage methods that will help preserve the items for future generations. They essentially design and build customized storage for each item.
For example, they gently stuff polyester batting and wads of unbleached cotton into each moccasin, to support its shape. They then build carriers made from special cardboard and lined with acid-free paper, which safely secures the moccasins and allows them to be moved and viewed without touching.
Then the moccasins go inside what look like cardboard boxes but what the technicians call “microchambers.” The boxes are made of special material that absorbs the chemical gasses naturally emitted in the aging process.
The project also installed new space-saver shelving units in the basement where the Native collection will be kept. The movable shelves help compensate for the greater space requirement created by the new boxes.
Conservation work, microchambers and movable shelves don’t come cheap. To pay for the $460,000 project, the society budgeted $180,000 and obtained a federal Save Our Treasures grant worth $170,000. The project received a $70,000 private gift, which means the society must still raise $40,000 privately.
Sometimes, the conservators can’t help but shake their heads over how some artifacts were handled by collectors and curators in the past. They’ve had to remove glue used in past exhibits or ink identifying numbers written directly on the object.
In rare cases, they’ve also found traces of poisons, such as arsenic. Because materials such as leather, wool and silk are susceptible to insects, early conservators used the poisons to protect the artifacts.
While they clean artifacts, they’re careful not to remove dirt that may have been put there by the wearer, or bits of unburned tobacco in a pipe. They carefully document and save such materials, which could be useful to future research.
The repairs themselves can be as simple as rehumidifying dried leather and as complex as using a material called goldbeater’s skin — a parchment made of bovine intestine — to fix a cracked drum. But they’re just repairs, intended to keep the artifact intact, rather than restoration efforts to make the objects like new.
And while the conservators make their repairs durable, they’re also reversible.
“We have to assume in the future there will be better conservation techniques than we’re using,” Koeppe said.
Respect for the makers
One of the rewards of working on the project is to spend so much time with incredible and rare objects, all of the conservators said.
An eagle claw necklace, a buckskin dress ornamented with shells, a doll in the shape of a little boy and dozens of arrows with turkey feather fletching and hand-made metal broadheads.
“The level of craftsmanship on one of these is pretty outstanding,” Koeppe said, pointing to a moccasin. “I have so much respect for the people who made these.”
In the hours spent in the lab, it’s easy to get lost in the thoughts about the people who made and used the objects.
Many of the individual stories behind them haven’t been recorded so there’s no way to know for sure about their owners and makers.
But Koeppe mentions a pair of well-worn moccasins that reportedly belonged to a young Czech immigrant who was kicked off a train in Nebraska after his money had been stolen. He was so hungry he ate fruit and vegetable peels discarded by travelers when a Native woman found him, fed him, gave him the moccasins and helped him get to the community where his relatives lived.
And once, when looking at a beaded bag, they found what appeared to be a hole made by a shotgun pellet. The bag also appeared to have a spot of blood on it, but there was no other documentation to answer the obvious questions it inspired.
For Waite, such questions are particularly poignant because she is of Oglala Lakota heritage.
She grew up near Scottsbluff, but as an adult, her connection to her roots has grown stronger, largely thanks to relatives who still live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
Those fears the unknown moccasin makers may have felt about the future of their traditions are still with Native people today, Waite said.
So in a small way, she feels like she’s doing something to help connect her ancestors with her nieces, nephews and the children she may one day have.
“Working with these objects gives me a connection to family,” she said. “It gives me a chance to feel like I’m doing something for them, I’m doing something to help pass on and preserve our cultural history.”
Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.
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