New England missionaries and American Indian art at the Peabody Essex Museum - Salem, Massachusetts

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1999 by John R. Grimes

Among the New England missionaries' undeniable legacies are the American Indian objects they collected and that are now in the Peabody Essex Museum. Some, like the box in Plate II, were simply personal mementos of mission life or gifts from the Indians. Other objects were intended to document the customs and utensils of those with whom the missionaries worked, including objects for display in the ABCFM's rooms in Boston. The labeling of some of these objects suggests that they may have served as props for language lessons or to document vocabulary words.

These missionary collections date primarily to the first half of the nineteenth century. Many of the objects demonstrate the influence of traders and missionaries, but it is important to avoid simplistically and erroneously seeing them as traditional or nontraditional. Rather, the Indian artists who made them responded, like artists everywhere, to a continuum of new ideas, influences, and materials. Thus the foot and lid of the box in Plate II were innovations inspired by European forms. However, the construction and dyed porcupine-quill embroidery represent long-standing Indian techniques. Likewise, to think of the abstract portrait of a trader or missionary on the pipe in Plate VIII as a naive caricature would be an egregious affront to the talent of the Lakota Indian artist who produced it. The glass trade beads and wool trade cloth of the Choctaw shoulder strap in Plate XI represent the artist's preferences among the available trade goods, but the double-scroll motif of the decoration can be traced to very ancient roots.

The Ojibwe cradleboard shown in Plate III is a tour de force of exquisite workmanship and expensive materials - a loving dedication to the child it protected. The beautiful, but restrained, decoration of the somewhat earlier Ojibwe leather pouch in Plate IX, on the other hand, reflects on the use of the pouch, which was probably intended to hold charms or medicine. Not surprisingly, American Indian artists were often sparing in their use of novel but expensive trade goods, incorporating them in ways that maximized their visual impact. Such is the case of the beaded and appliqued highlights on the early nineteenth-century Northern Plains Indian shirt in Plate XII. In other cases, the use of trade goods simply reflected a minimalist aesthetic, as reflected by the brass-tack snipe's eyes on the Dakota dance flute shown in Plate I.

American Indian art both past and present is a complex living tapestry of cultural expression. The Indian works collected by New England's missionaries, viewed alongside the earlier acquisitions of mariners and explorers, the later works of the reservation period, and the enormous and varied artistic output of American Indians during the twentieth century, can give us a deep appreciation of the vital and transcendent ethos that underlies the Indians' creativity and art.

1 For more about this early catalogue see John Grimes, "An Enlightened Society," Peabody Museum of Salem Register, Winter 1990-1991, pp. 4-5.