Artist Talk Delves into Accession History of the Southeast Collection at the Yale Peabody Museum
On April 4th, 2024, in conjunction with the Spring YGSNA Conference, the “Global History of Indigenous Thought,” the Yale Peabody Museum hosted an artist talk for the opening of RESONANCE OF THINGS UNSEEN: Indigenous Sovereignty, Institutional Accession, & Private Correspondence. This programming featured poet, artist, and activist Houston R. Cypress, of the Otter Clan and Love the Everglades Movement, and artist and Masters of Environmental Design candidate at the Yale School of Architecture, Emily Velez Nelms. Sandra Sánchez, doctoral candidate in History at Yale University, moderated the conversation.
The art exhibition, produced by Emily Velez Nelms, examines the formation of the museum’s Southeast collection. Through an intervention in the professional papers of a former Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History curator William C. Sturtevant, the installation raises significant questions regarding the intimacies between Indigenous communities, academic interests, and the tourism industry.
Central to the artwork are Sturtevant’s archival letters, receipts, and grant applications, accessed during a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Anthropology Archive. For the first time, 19 documents related to the journey of over 200 objects and their relationship to the history of genetic study at Yale are on display for the public. The exhibition distinctly reimagines Sturtevants’s documents as yellow fly paper embedded with mosquitos within the purview of Everglades National Park, serving as a visual metaphor of a “parasitic ethnographer”.
During the artist talk, Cypress and Velez Nelms addressed some of the complexities involved in Sturtevant’s fieldwork practices, including the uncredited intellectual labor of Mikasuki elder Josie Billie and the collection’s direct relationship with American tourism. While Velez Nelms deconstructed Sturtevant’s ethnographic practices through a focus on his thesis documents, Cypress presented on contemporary efforts to restore the damages of institutional presence in wetlands through community organizing and collaborative events, including ceremony, prayer walks, film, installation, and performance. Cypress also emphasized the shared benefit of both Native and non-Native residents in investing in the health of the land and ecosystem, noting that the wetlands provide drinking water to three-fourths of the state’s population.
The talk concluded with a reflection on Indigenous tourism in Florida, highlighting it as both a practice historically rooted in exploitation, as well as a viable economic endeavor for Native participants. Both speakers noted that acknowledging this duality is essential to support the numerous past and contemporary decisions made by Native nations to open businesses in the tourism industry. The conversation ended with a strong emphasis on the importance of supporting Indigenous-led land stewardship, rather than government-led preservation programs, viewing this as a step toward reducing institutional presence in the wetlands.
To learn further about Love the Everglades Movement and their intergenerational and inclusive sustainability practices, please visit LovetheEvergladesMovement.com.
The RESONANCE OF THINGS UNSEEN: Indigenous Sovereignty, Institutional Accession, & Private Correspondence is open to the public until November 1, 2024.
Exhibition and programming for the Resonance of Unseen Things was made possible by the Yale Peabody Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery’s Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund, Yale Environmental Humanities, Public Humanities at Yale, the Yale Group for the study of Native America, and the Yale School of Architecture.