Camp Keeper’s Diary
How to Ruin a Tribal Sale — Part One: The Cactus
Listen to the Camp Keeper
Jeanne, my Crow sister, and I spent close to a year and at least four meetings making presentations to the Arizona Tribes at their headquarters. Native American tribal government is organized very much like the Department of the Interior — lots of committees, each with the authority to kill your deal. Our biggest hurdle was explaining why our plates were “backwards,” so we invented a hand game to demonstrate. That took a while.
Finally, we made it to the joint Tribal Cultural Committee for our last presentation. The audience was attentive. We finished, opened the floor for questions — and a woman wearing buckskin walked in.
She raised her hand. “Is it true that Edward Curtis hid behind a cactus to take unauthorized photographs of our ancestors? And that these photographs and your plates therefore belong to our tribe? You should just give them back to us.”
What could I say? Curtis spent months interviewing their Elders for The North American Indian. He had their permission for every photograph. The text was not made up from behind a cactus.
The Tribes declined the acquisition.
Lucky for us, the Cahuilla — who also live in the Sonoran Desert, among cactus — did not feel the same way. They bought their entire collection.