at the Pomona college benton museum of art

Note: Reading suggestions are specifically geared to students in Archaeology & Society, fall 2022.

WEEK ONE

Please read carefully — and note any questions that you have about — the information provided by the Benton Museum on the Provenance of their Native American Collection.

Scroll through the Benton Museum’s Online Portfolio of Native American Baskets.

Please read selections of the “Basket Makers of Coachella Valley”(1927) and “Tales of a Desert Indian” (n.d.). These unpublished manuscripts (with photographs) were created by Pomona College Alumnus, Emil Steffa, who donated the majority of the Benton’s Cahuilla baskets. Steffa’s original manuscripts are owned by the Pomona College Archives and housed at the Claremont Colleges Library Special Collections. (If you have time and curiosity, schedule a visit to see the original documents.). They present Steffa’s first-hand account of how he understood (or constructed) his identity as a collector as well as his stories and photographs of the Native American individuals and communities from which he obtained his collection.

The Benton Museum is currently organizing a new exhibit (scheduled for  2023) of their extensive collection of Cahuilla baskets: Cahuilla Basket Weavers, Emil Steffa, and Their Legacies.  See here for details about the museum’s collaborative plans and an announcement of the museum’s award of a terra foundation grant to support the curation of this exhibition.

Watch this video as an introduction to NAGPRA and issues relating to the collection of Native American materials: “Carrying Our Ancestors Home”*

Week two

Read these two articles from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians’ Magazine me-yah-wha: “A Weaving of Culture and Beauty” by Marissa Willman (Spring/Summer 2016) and “Maintaining the Thread” by June Allen Corrigan (Spring/Summer 2019).

Meranda Roberts is the lead curator of the Benton’s Cahuilla Basketry exhibit. Explore Dr. Roberts’ videos and podcasts (on her website) and have a look at her her dissertation, Resiliency of Native American Women Basket Weavers from California, Great Basin, and the Southwest.   (We watched Meranda Roberts’ TEDx talk: “Bringing Accountability to Museums” a few weeks ago).

*Note that additional resources for the study of NAGPRA are available here https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/archandsoc/chapter/suggestions-sele…for-case-studies/

Optional Supplemental Resources:

Bill Anthes, a faculty member at Pitzer college, provides a unique way of interpreting the style of Cahuilla baskets, from an art-historical perspective: Anthes, Bill. “Making Pictures on Baskets: Modern Indian Painting in an Expanded Field” In Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism edited by Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips, 91-109. New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2018