Blog 6 - The Containment of Culture: The Narrative of the Lost and Found Native American Powwow Dress

The Containment of Culture:

The Narrative of the Lost and Found Native American Powwow Dress

     In creating reservations for Native Americans, the policy of the United States was containment. The reservation land was legally designated as an area managed by a Native American tribe under the US Bureau of Indian Affairs instead of by the US government. This notion of containing a culture, either on a reservation or in a museum, is explored in both Sherman Alexie's novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, as well as in Susan Power's short story, “Museum Indians.” In Alexie's novel, Junior leaves a Native American reservation on a daily basis in order to attend a public school, which is predominantly white. Junior does this to break away from the futile mindset and cycle of poverty on the reservation; he hopes for a better future for himself. In “Museum Indians,” Power's mother leaves a Yanktonnai Dakota reservation at the age of sixteen to take a job in Chicago so that she can help her family during “the war” (Power 36). As Power is being raised by her mother in Chicago, she learns about Native American culture through trips to the Field Museum of Natural History, which include visits to the display of her great-grandmother's buckskin dress. During these trips to the museum, it becomes evident that Power's mother feels contained by her life in the city. Power recognizes this containment and cultural loss through the eyes of a child who was born in the city and is half white. Similarly, Junior is exposed to two cultures and has the burden of knowing the poverty of Native American reservations. Both Alexie and Power express the containment and slow death of Native American culture through the use of a Native American dress metaphor.

     In “Museum Indians,” Power and her mother visit her great-grandmother's buckskin dress, which is a metaphor for containment and loss. When Power visits the Sioux in the Plains Indian section at the museum, she states, “I think of them as dead Indians” (38). Then she states:

...and there is the dress, as magnificent as I remembered. The yoke is completely beaded – I know the garment must be heavy to wear. My great-grandmother used blue beads as a background for the geometrical design, and I point to the azure expanse. 'Was this her blue period?' I ask my mother. She hushes me unexpectedly, she will not play the game. I come to understand that this is a solemn call, and we stand before the glass case as we would before a grave. (Power 38)

     As a child, Power recognizes the solemnity of the moment by observing her mother and listening to her mother's explanations of other art work in the museum. When she asks if the blue in the dress is the great-grandmother's blue period, this is a reference to their stop at the Art Institute where her mother pauses before a Picasso blue period painting. Power and her mother decide together that Picasso must have been very sad during his blue period. The implication here is that Power understands her mother is sad because the powwow dress is contained in a museum, but also that the great-grandmother had known sadness while making the dress because, even in the great-grandmother's time, the Native American way of life was changing.

     Additionally, Power and her mother stop to view a mummy and a small buffalo, which are metaphors for containment as well. As they study an Egyptian mummy, Power's mother whispers, “These were people like us...They had dreams and intrigues and problems with their teeth. They thought their one particular life was of the utmost significance. And now, just look at them” (37). At this moment, Power's mother parallels her own duality because the first part of her life, until she was sixteen, she was a Native American from a reservation. The next life she has is in the city where her identity as a Native American is muted. Last, Power discusses the little buffalo that is across the hall from the buckskin dress. Her mother “doesn't always have the heart to greet him” (38). Although Powers says that few things make her mother cry, the buffalo does because she identifies with him. As her mother addresses the buffalo, she says, “I am just like you...I don't belong here either. We should be in the Dakotas, somewhere east of the Missouri River. This crazy city is not a fit home for buffalo or Dakotas” (39). While the great-grandmother's dress and the Picasso painting were inanimate objects, the buffalo was a living creature, which is even more unnatural that he is contained and behind glass. Thus, Power effectively communicates the impossible and inhumane task of putting an entire culture behind glass for the world to see when culture is alive and must be experienced.

     If Power's short story of her mother and the visit to the powwow dress is a dignified representation of Native Americans and their loss of culture, Alexie's powwow dress metaphor in The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a mockery of those that acquire Native American culture. When Billionaire Ted shows up at the funeral for Junior's grandmother, Junior and other members of the reservation groan because they “expected this white guy to be original. But he was yet another white guy who showed up on the rez because he loved Indian people SOOOOOOOO much” (Alexie 162). Junior states that Ted's interest is “sickening. And boring” (162). When Ted says, “I know white people say that all the time. But I still need to say it. I love Indians. I love your songs, your dances, and your souls. And I love your art. I collect Indian art” (163). Then, Junior thinks to himself, “Oh, God, he was a collector. Those guys made Indians feel like insects pinned to a display board” (163). To make matters worse, Ted pulls out a heavily beaded powwow dance outfit and explains his belief that “this Indian stranger said he was in a desperate situation. His wife was dying of cancer and he needed money to pay for her medicine. I knew he was lying. I knew he'd stolen the outfit. I could always smell a thief” (163). Then, Junior thinks to himself, “Smell yourself, Ted” (164). Alexie's point is that the glorification of Native American artifacts is at odds with the poverty that actual Native Americans live in on a reservation. While Ted pays one thousand dollars for the powwow dress and hangs it on his cabin wall, Junior and others on the reservation shop for their clothes at Kmart. Under the guise of returning the dress to the family of its rightful owner, Grandmother Spirit, Billionaire Ted seeks to ingratiate himself to Native Americans so that he can be a part of the culture he glorifies. Instead, Ted discovers that the anthropologist that he consulted had actually misinformed him. According to Junior's mother, the dress was not Spokane, but possibly Sioux, and Junior's grandmother, also known as Grandmother Spirit, had not been a powwow dancer. After Ted leaves with the dress, Junior states that “two thousand Indians laughed at the same time” (166). Thus, Alexie effectively uses the powwow dress as a metaphor for Native Americans who have not only had their culture stolen, but cannot sustain a beautiful way of life due to the abject poverty in which they live.

   Thus, both Power and Alexie end their narratives that include the powwow dress in a similar fashion, which reinforces the notion of the powwow dress as a metaphor for the containment and loss of Native American culture. Power and her mother leave the dress behind glass in the museum to be visited again at a later date. And Billionaire Ted hastily drives off with the powwow dress he purchased, presumably to be displayed on his wall again. In terms of an activity for the classroom, I would encourage students to bring in an item that has a story. We would conduct show and tell: circle up and tell the story of our objects. Then, the students would write a brief narrative of the object, or another object, in which the object is a metaphor. The narratives would demonstrate the students' understanding of metaphor.