Spread out on a table at the Sequoyah National Research Center are a few examples of consumer goods that feature stereotypes of American Indians. Tony Rose, the center’s projects coordinator, and archivist Erin Fehr have pulled them from a larger collection of such things.
What’s on the table ranges from the fashionable - a maroon Countess Mara tie with a smattering of tepees - to the outrageous - a board game called “Wahoo” with four unflattering Indian caricatures.
Fehr picked up the board for a closer look at the scowling, leering, panting, drooling Indians.
“It’s awful,” she said.
Awfully numerous, too, since the tie and the board game are part of a collection of roughly 1,800 objects given to the center in 2012 and 2013 by two retired educators, along with pieces picked up by Rose and Fehr, “catch as catch can,” Rose said, “at junk shops.”
The educators are Arlene Hirschfelder of Teaneck, N.J., and Paulette Molin of Hampton, Va. Rose said each worked with American Indians, collected the artifacts over decades, knew each other and decided to donate their collections to the center along with documentation and provenance.
UALR’s Sequoyah Center, which collects literary and artistic works by American Indians, will have an exhibit gleaned from the stereotypes collection. The exhibit will be open to the public, starting Sept. 5 and run through the end of the year. It will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the center, at Asher and University avenues.
Currently on exhibit is “Art From Above the Arctic Circle,” which features divergent media and art styles from native peoples in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Lapland. The artworks are part of the Dr. J.W. Wiggins Native American Art Collection, donated to UALR in 2004.
Sports teams are represented in abundance in the stereotypes collection. On the table is a towel with Chief Illiniwek, athletic mascot of the University of Illinois. The chief was retired in 2007.
Still active is Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians. Sequoyah’s collection includes team caps and pennants, including a pennant from 1954, a year in which the team finished first in the American League.
The collection has toys, clothes, salt and pepper shakers, ceramics - and whiskey bottles. Here’s a whiskey bottle, labeled Fire-Water, from a distillery in Wilmington, N.Y.
The label has some doggerel:
“Throat dry
“Whistle wet
“Feelum better
“Better yet
“Wantum sing
“Tonsils tickled
“Whoa Brave
“You’re pickled
“Dead Injun.”
The stereotype collection is a small part of Sequoyah’s whole, which includes thousands of books, tribal newspapers and works of art.
The exhibit will make many of the the artifacts available to the public, Fehr said.
“They can see up close how denigrating and marginalizing and dehumanizing these objects really are.”
Style, Pages 54 on 04/27/2014