Changing of the Guard Breathes New Life into The Heritage Center at Red Cloud School

Wednesday, 30 September 2009 18:54

 

Editor's Note: For over forty years Brother C.M. Simon, SJ, was the The Heritage Center at Red Cloud School on the Pine Ridge Reservation. (http://www.redcloudschool.org/museum/staff.htm) Like a whirlwind, he purchased and collected thousands of pieces of art, curated the annual summer art exhibition, and kept his finger on the pulse of emerging artists from Navajo Country to Standing Rock. When Brother Simon passed away two years ago in a tragic drowning accident at Angostura Reservoir the future of the The Heritage Center was entrusted to two exceptional young museum executives--Director Peter Strong, and Curator Mary Bordeaux. The two sat down recently with Black Hills artist Denise DuBroy for a conversation about one of the most comprehensive but little known collections of Native American art in the country...just a hundred miles from Rapid City.

Denise Du Broy: Where did The Heritage Center collection begin?

Peter Strong: The historical collection comes from two major areas. Some things came out of the Jesuit Attic. Things had been donated to the Jesuits at the Red Cloud mission, or gifted as part of Lakota culture to say thank you for performing a funeral, or those kinds of things. So priests were gifted these items, and since the priests took vows of poverty and kept no personal belongings, they just kind of went into the attic. So that collection built up over the 120-year history of this mission.

 

On the catalog card for many items it says, "Found in Jesuit Attic". That's the whole story for those items. We don't have any more details. It was literally an attic, the third floor in the back of one of these old buildings. They just wrapped things up and set them in the attic. None of them knew what to do with the artwork. They were priests from Wisconsin, or Minnesota, or Germany and France. The farther back in the history of the mission you go, they didn't know what to do with the gifts.

 

The rest of the collection comes from private donors. The historical collection came from people like the Dawson family. They donated a lot of major pieces. The great grandfather had the trading post on the reservation when the reservation was created in the 1880's. His collection passed through the family, and they said, "This needs to go back to the reservation. Our family is not equipped to maintain all of this. We want to donate it."

 

Some items are from Ralph and June West. They are another family who made major donations. American Horse's top hat came from them.

 

So there were certain families whose ancestors collected, and the family eventually said "This needs to go to an institution on the reservation that can care for it and display it and make sure that it goes back to the Lakota people."

 

Some contemporary art collectors were just friends of Brother Simon. They knew what the museum was doing displaying artwork to people who otherwise wouldn't get a chance to see it. Who would ever expect to come in and see this great collection of northwest coast prints on display on the Pine Ridge reservation?

 

Denise Du Broy: Who was Brother Simon? How did he become involved in the Heritage Center?

 

Peter Strong: He was the bookkeeper for the mission so he handled all of the finances. Everyone I've talked to says that he read so much. They would see his light on late at night. He would be reading books on native art. Art history. Appraisals. Because he didn't have a degree of any kind, I think people grudgingly accepted him as an authority. By the end of his life he was probably one of the top experts in native art in the world, and especially northern plains native art. He knew every pueblo in the southwest, and the differences between them. He even knew the artists. He was probably among the top ten or fifteen experts in native art as a whole.

Denise Du Broy: Did Brother Simon have a plan when he built the collection? Or was it just built around his own personal interests?

 

Peter Strong: He was given a lot of latitude. He was the The Heritage Center for forty years. He was the only employee for probably 35 of those years. So it was his whim.

 

He was an amazing collector. He had a really good eye for art. He knew where everything was. He was one of those old school types. But he was not organized in a professionally recognized way.

 

He was very idiosyncratic and eclectic. But he was also really practical. If it was cheaper to transport small-framed work, he would buy small-framed work. If he didn't like someone, he wouldn't buy their art. It was very much based around his personality.

 

If we go in the back storage shelves you will see an amazing collection of southwest pottery. But by the time I got here he said, "If I never see another black pot in my life I'll be happy." He never wanted to touch one again. He had been through that phase of personal collecting, and he was done with it. He had really moved into two-dimensional pieces. But I think mostly it was because he had so little space. He knew he had too much stuff.

Denise Du Broy: You both worked with Brother Simon while he was alive. Was that helpful?

 

Peter Strong: It was amazing. Having worked with him day in and day out for a little over a year I really got a feel for his attitude about why he collected what he did. He told me, "You have to collect the bad art in order to fully appreciate the good art." That's why we have so much kitsch in the collection.

 

That was also justification for him to support local people who needed to put food on the table for their families. They would have a half-done "God's Eye". You know those yarn things that were done in the 70's. And he would buy it from them for seven dollars. That was a way to help them feed their kids. And, as a Jesuit, that was part of his personal mission-to help people.

 

I have heard John Day (former Chair of Art Department, University of South Dakota) talk about how important he was in the lean years, when no one was supporting native artists, and he would support Don Montileaux, and Don Ruleaux. He really cared deeply about this place.

 

Denise DuBroy: Was all that memory lost when he passed away?

 

Peter Strong: When I was hired I was told that my primary goal was to download Brother Simon's knowledge. That is literally what they told me in my interview. Mary had come in a year before to catalog the collection. She was the first museum-trained person to come here. The Bush Foundation funded her position. We went back to them when Brother Simon passed away. We've started to catalog, but the collection is about three times bigger than we originally estimated. Simon always said, "We have about 2,000 pieces." That was his estimate of everything. It turns out that we have 2,200 paintings, and over 7,500 three-dimensional pieces--a total of 10,000 pieces. No one knew. Because of that, Bush funded part of the two- year project to catalog the collection. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded the rest of it.

 

Denise Du Broy: So you have been cataloging 10,000 pieces of art for over three years. What have you discovered? What's in the collection?

 

Peter Strong: The collection is divided into two primary divisions. We have the historical Lakota art, so that would be anything like the old beadwork, quillwork, lots of moccasins, and those kinds of things. And then we have the contemporary Native American artwork, which is from native artists from around the country, art that has been collected consistently for more than forty years.

 

We have two carved masks from the northwest coast. And last year we had an Inuit print exhibition of pieces donated by the Henslers. We have a stone cut print from the 60's that probably on the open market would have little value, but for us is very important. The Henslers continually donate things. They are used to the old Brother Simon way. He used to say, "Whatever you are going to give us will make the collection stronger."

 

Because of the Henslers we have the northwest coast prints. We have jewelry boxes with Navajo sand paintings on the lids. We have, like ten of those. The Henslers said, "You don't have any of these. Take these." They would think that he liked them, so they would go buy another one at the next market. It was all about individual personalities. It was all about the way that Simon finessed them. He had a genuine interest in people's lives. He was a self-identified schmoozer. He loved to talk.

Mary Bordeaux: We have 78 paintings from one artist, from a two-year period. It was all because Simon saw the potential in this artist, and wanted to support him, and really wanted him to become great. So he would commission pieces from him. He would say, "Bring me what you have, and I will buy it so you can buy more paint, more canvasses. So we ended up with 78 pieces that are almost exactly the same. Simon saw something in him and wanted him to do well. But this artist had other issues, and other things to worry about, like trying to feed his family. Simon had some of his early works, and he is really an amazing artist. But he had other things to worry about, and so he's more of a craft artist now. In the gift shop, we carry his stuff and it looks like it is mass produced, or at least repetitive. I think he was working that way, and Simon was trying to pull him back into the fine art world. It was a real struggle. It works for him, and makes him money.

 

Denise Du Broy: Have you discovered any treasures you didn't know you had?

 

Peter Strong: We've got major historical pieces like Red Cloud's gun, and American Horse's top hat. And we just found a headdress that the card said, "...belonged to old man Black Elk". We didn't know we had that. We just found it two weeks ago.

 

Denise Du Broy: Really? That recently?

 

Peter Strong: Yes. They had put all the headdresses aside, trying to get them all in the same place, sorted properly. And they cataloged them all together and one said, "This belonged to old man Black Elk". We're doing more research to see if that is true. We looked at some old pictures, and there is a picture of Black Elk, from "Black Elk Speaks", in a headdress. It has the same beadwork, but it looks like the one we have has been fixed, or re-worked. We looked at his son's headdress, and this one is very much in the style of his son. So we're leaning toward the idea that his son probably fixed it up and added some things. There's really no way to confirm that unless we go through the family records, and I don't know if they still exist.

 

Part of what we're trying to do is work with the community to say, "We have all this beadwork," and we know that families had beadwork patterns, certain patterns for a certain tiospaye, a certain family. And we are trying to slowly reach out and work with people in the communities to come in and say, "Help us try and identify some things." That helps us have a connection to the community.

 

Mary Bordeaux: I really appreciate beaded moccasins, especially when they are old. You can see the footprint of the person that was wearing them, and the way they walked. There's a personality there.

 

Peter Strong: You can see in this child's moccasin how things were reused. If you look down inside, that used to be a parfleche bag. When they were no longer able to be used they were reused as soles for moccasins. Those kinds of things bring the humanity into the art work.

 

Denise Du Broy: Do you have much of a response from the community, in the sense of having people come in and say, "I know this piece..."

 

Peter Strong: We have that in the back of our minds. We haven't had that happen yet. As part of our cataloging grants we brought in what we call "cultural consultants". These are people from the local community with knowledge about historical beadwork, the way things were done. People seem flattered and surprised to be asked. They enjoyed coming in and seeing what we had and talking about how things were made and why they were made that way. It showed that we are trying to work together.

 

Simon really tried to do a lot of that informally. But he was one guy with 10,000 objects. That's why he said there were only 2,000. That's why he kept it all in the basement of the church, and didn't tell anyone about it.

 

We're trying now to take it to the next level. You've got museums like the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington D.C. trying to be all-inclusive and opening up their collection. Anyone who is part of a tribe can handle objects. There are some really great precedents being set there. We don't have the luxury of their set up. But we're trying to find ways to do that in our own way.

 

Luckily our historical collection is just one culture, so we can make sure that what we do with it really fits with the local community. We can work with different members of the community to find the right way to do things.

Denise Du Broy: Are there big gaps where you say, "Okay. We don't need any more of these. Or we do need more of this."

 

Peter Strong: The whole point of cataloging was to get it done and then start analyzing the collection and developing ways to use it.

 

We could look around and say, "We need more Alan Houser, or Oscar Howe", but that's not realistic. We have one of each, and that's probably all we can ever afford. It's just a very eclectic but well-rounded collection.

 

Mary Bordeaux: There is stuff that Simon would categorize as "ugly" or "not pretty". That's what the card would say. Sometimes the card would say, "Crude and ugly." And then you look at it and you think, "Yeah, that's what it is." But it is important to remember that people were doing these things to raise money and needing to sell so they are doing them quickly.

 

I think it would be fun to have a show that tried to show the things he called "ugly".

 

Peter Strong: Brother Simon somehow found these old Jim Beam bottles, whiskey bottles or Jack Daniels that were shaped like an Indian chief, or Mt. Rushmore. He's got a whole collection of those bottles.

 

Mary Bordeaux: The head comes off the top to pour from.

 

Peter Strong: Yeah, the Chief's head comes off and that's where you pour the whiskey from. He's got a whole box of Christmas ornaments. I found a Skoal can where he had some local artist paint a winter landscape scene on the Skoal can and he hung it on the Christmas tree.

 

There is an inherent social history in a lot of the pieces we have that is unexplored. But we will start looking at that as we go forward.

 

Mary Bordeaux: We have dolls that were made here on the reservation that are not the prettiest little things you have ever seen, but they were made on the reservation at the moccasin factory in the 70s, and Simon has a collection of them. Those are things that people thought would make them money, so they are important to the social history of the reservation as Lakota people. People are very inventive, from using parfleche bags to make moccasins, to when they would take flour sacks apart to make dresses. Nowadays people beading lighters and key chains and wine glass stems. It shows our history and how we've taken what is around us and made it our own, even the ugly things in this collection really show that. It's important to show that we persevere.

 

Denise Du Broy: To the extent that this collection tells a story, what is the story?

 

Peter Strong: Throw in that there are over 560 federally recognized tribes in the country. So we have art that represents a lot of the creativity that comes out of those cultures too. It shows that those cultures aren't the same. That's part of the misconception that is out there as part of popular culture, they are not the same. We still get people who come in every summer and say "I want to buy some native baskets or pottery, or turquoise." We use the opportunity to educate. We can show them, but we say, "That's not from here. If you want to see something from here, look at agates." We show them the work of people like Jhon Goes In Center (http://www.lakotajewelry.com/web-docs/GIChome.htm), and other local artists who are working with materials that Lakota artists have been working with for generations.

 

Denise Du Broy: What is the future? What are your priorities now that you two are in charge?

 

Peter Strong: We are in the last few months of the cataloging project. We started cataloging five years ago, but this final phase has been three years in the making. Now it's almost done. Every single item in the collection will be cataloged, which will let us do a lot of things, including let us figure out what can be deaccessioned to free up some space. Some pieces have been damaged beyond use, or they are from non-native artists, or they just don't fit our collection. The cataloging also allows us to review what we should be purchasing. If you look at what we have purchased in the last year, the three-dimensional pieces are very small. We just don't have room for any big bronzes, or anything larger than a basket.

 

Denise Du Broy: Are people starting to use the collection? Do people come in on a daily basis and ask to use the collection?

 

Peter Strong: We've been limited by the organization of the collection, to put it nicely. Basically we couldn't find anything. If people came in and they wanted to research war shields-I know that was a request that came in, old Lakota shields-we didn't know if we had any, and when Simon passed away the knowledge of what we had and where it was, was gone. Now we can be prepared to receive those research requests. We are really trying to open the collection up to legitimate researchers and scholarly artists, or just people from the community who would like to come and see the way that old pipe bags were made, or the techniques of quillwork. We don't exactly know what to expect, but we are trying to find ways to open the collection up in a responsible way.

 

Mary Bordeaux: The computer database will help, because we are taking digital pictures of every piece in the collection. A researcher can just search the database. We're hoping in the next year to put that online, so researchers can do their research online. That limits access to the original collection. It's good for security reasons, and for preservation, because people aren't handling the objects. If they really want to see the objects that can come after they have researched through the database.

 

We have created a study collection. And the study collection will be something that people can handle more often. The pieces will be more accessible to the public. People will be able to do in-house loans with us, and we will take them to their offices. There are going to be objects, for example, that have had feathers on them, or fur, and have been damaged beyond repair, or even recognition by insects. We can't really keep a feather stem if we're not sure what it belonged to or where it came from. Those are things we would dispose of properly working with cultural consultants.

 

Our historical collection is unique because it has never been treated with any kind of pesticide the way that a lot of older museums, especially on the east coast used to do. In the old days collections were treated with pesticides, so they wouldn't be damaged by insects. But they are poisonous now.

Peter Strong: Then they found out, "Oh, this arsenic stuff isn't so great."

 

Mary Bordeaux: Our collection is great because people can handle it, and wear it if they want to and not get sick. But it did leave it open to being infested by all kinds of insects.

 

Denise Du Broy: Are you building the collection? How do you decide what art to add to the collection?

 

Peter Strong: The Heritage Center has always supported up-and-coming native artists since day one. But we also like to support artists who have been around for a while if they have changed their style. We would like to get a piece to represent who they are becoming in the continuum of their growth. As far as the historical pieces we really focus on Lakota and primarily right from this reservation.

 

It's always easier to collect young, emerging artists just because of the price tag. That allows us to collect quite a few pieces in one year on a very small budget. We do try to support an existing artist when we can. We have a piece of Roger Broer that was in this summer's show that we just thought was a great step forward in what he's doing, and something that we haven't seen before in him. So it represents something  that we haven't seen.

 

Mary Bordeaux: We have also just begun to collect three-dimensional work again.

 

Peter Strong: We have a special place in our hearts for local artists, but we don't collect them exclusively.  That reflects the annual art show. It's a venture that began in 1968. It started as a way to get young native artists a way to get something under their belt, to get something on their resume, to get the experience of showing their work in a professional way.

 

Denise Du Broy: The annual Red Cloud Indian Art Show has become really big and successful.

 

Peter Strong: Well, it started out with Father Ted Zuern and Bob Savage who was a journalist from Omaha. He had been a supporter of Red Cloud School. They saw the success of Santa Fe Indian Market, and they said, there really is a model. We've got all these people with an inherent understanding of Lakota culture. They appreciate the beauty of things, and add beauty to everyday objects, and they are great painters. Don Montileaux was a student at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Art) when the show started. He has been the only artist in every single show. They said, let's just start this and see what happens. If we publicize it, it brings recognition to the school. And it does fit the Jesuit ideals of finding God in all things. The Jesuits have been patrons of the arts since the 14^th century, in Europe and the United States. It just grew from there. It's wasn't a huge exhibition early on, but there were big names, like Mary Morez, in the early shows. I think Arthur Amiotte entered some shows in the early years. There were a lot of southwest artists, just because that was the hub of Indian art back then. It has turned into the longest running show of its kind in the country. That means, it's on a reservation, it's not a weekend market. It's a show. It runs for multiple weeks. And it's inter-tribal.

 

Mary Bordeaux: In the annual show we don't turn art away. Everything that is submitted is accepted. As long as you send gallery ready art, and you are eighteen and an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, we'll accept it. That includes Canadian natives, Alaska and Hawaiian natives. We accept a maximum of six pieces from each individual, but that may change next year. This year we had 211 pieces and the gallery was packed. There wasn't any way we were going to put any more art anywhere. The only thing we jury for is the prizes. We have $7,000 in prizes.

 

Peter Strong: Included in that is $2,000 in purchase awards. We promise to spend $2,000 to purchase pieces for the permanent collection. That is important because it helps build people's resumes. And now that we have a full time curator, who is putting out shows that travel, there's pretty strong potential for artists to get exposure by being in our collection. It can be very important, especially for a young artist.

 

So we've got the Simon collection and the post-Simon collection. We're going to clean up parts of his collection, but we don't want it to lose its character. And we keep his picture on the wall watching us for a reason. We're cleaning up, polishing the edges. But we're moving forward in his spirit. We're still here to support artists and to preserve traditional Lakota art.

 

Click here to see more pictures from the Red Cloud Heritage Center.

Written by Denise DuBroy You are reading Changing of the Guard Breathes New Life into The Heritage Center at Red Cloud School articles