Exclusive Labels: Indexing the National "We" inCommemorative and Oppositional Exhibitions
Pauline Turner Strong
Labelling has long been one of the most prob-lematic and contested practices in muse-ums. As George Brown Goode, Director of
the U.S. National Museum, put it over a century ago,"the preparation of labels is one of the most difficulttasks of the museum man" (Alexander 1979:183).Quaint as this statement sounds today, it speaksequally to the experience of Goode's contemporary,Franz Boas, who lost a position over his cautious andmeticulous labelling (Jacknis 1985), and to the chal-lenges and controversies faced by many a curatortoday. While certain notable recent controversieshave centered on displayed objects themselves —human remains, sacred objects, and sexually ex-plicit art, for instance — others revolve primarilyaround the way in which otherwise uncontested ob-jects are labelled (Adams 1997).
Struggles over labelling, I suggest in this article,may be illuminated through employing a semioticmodel that attends to the full range of messagesconveyed by museum labels — and especially tomessages about the communicative events in whichlabels themselves function.1 In other words, likemany of the contributors to Exhibiting Cultures andMuseums and Communities (Karp and Lavine 1991;Karp, Kreamer, and Lavine 1992), I am interestedin analyzing the complex "communicative practices"(Hanks 1996) in which labels and other interpretiveforms are embedded. The semiotic model offers aparticularly systematic and integrated approach tothe relationship between representation and com-munication in museums—an approach that revealssome of the more subtle ways in which labels func-
tion not only as sources of information and interpre-tation but also as mechanisms of social inclusion orexclusion. In the pages that follow I introduce as-pects of the model that are particularly germane tothe study of the labelling of collective subjects inmuseums. My examples are mainly drawn from alarger study of several controversial exhibitionsmounted in the United States in commemoration ofthe Columbian Quincentenary.2
A Semiotic Approach to Museum LabelsIn terms of C.S. Peirce's (1955) famous
trichotomy of signs — icon, index, and symbol —museum labels function primarily as indexes or"pointers" (Mertz and Parmentier 1985). As such,they indicate a complex set of relations among dis-played objects, the contexts and meanings attrib-uted to them, and the knowledges, identities,expectations, and agendas of both museum profes-sionals and the publics they serve. In other words,labels situate displayed objects in a wide range ofsocial, cultural, historical, and material contexts,only some of which are physically present in thedisplay case or exhibit hall. Others are representedthrough text or sensory images, while still othersinvolve the multiple frames of reference throughwhich audiences approach an exhibition (Perin1992).
In contrast to symbols (which signify in an arbi-trary or conventional fashion) and icons (which sig-nify metaphorically or through shared qualities),indexes signify metonymically or through juxtapo-sition (Jakobson 1960). These are not mutually ex-
EXCLUSIVE LABELS.INDEXING THE NATIONAL "WE' IN COMMEMORATIVE AND OPPOSITIONAL EXHIBITIONS 43
elusive modes of signifcation:While museum labelsemploy the symbolic and iconic modes liberally (intext, on the one hand, and in diagrams, maps logosand tropes on the other), the meaning of labels iscrucially affected by their placement; that is, by ho wthey are juxtaposed to particular displayed objects,display cases, entranceways, ancillary material,other labels, and — crucially — viewers' gazes. Theindexical mode of establishing meaningful relationsmay be best appreciated through the characteristicform of play or subversion to which it gives rise, i.e.,irony, which undermines, unsettles, or engagesthrough unexpected juxtapositions (Clifford 1988aKrupat 1990, White 1973). Some ironical juxtaposi-tions in museums are the work of irreverent audiences, but increasingly they may also be part of anexhibition's design. Take, for example, the main la-bel for Seeds of Change: Five Hundred Years of En-counter and Exchange, the major Quincentenaryexhibition mounted by the Smithsonian Institution.At the entrance to the exhibit hall in the NationalMuseum of Natural History, the main label was af-fixed to a replica of a Midwestern "corn palace" (fig.1). This curious example of Euro-American vernacu-lar architecture loosely illustrated the exhibition'scentral theme, encounter and exchange, by virtue ofits indigenous material, corncobs. But it did this ina literal manner, playfully spelling out "Seeds ofChange" in seeds of maize upon an elaborate gate-way designed to entice audiences — particularlyMiddle American audiences — to enter the exhibithall despite its abstract and unfamiliar theme.
The relationships indexed by labels are inevita-bly the product of difficult choices and uneasy com-promises, just as inevitably, labels embody bothintended and unintended silences and exclusions(Fujitani, this issue; Trouillot 1990). Labels at anylevel, from the main label of an exhibition to thoseintended for specialists, are the product of a processof selection that foregrounds and entextualizessome relationships at the expense of others, whichmay be treated in a cursory fashion or entirely ne-glected (Jakobson 1960, Silverstein and Urban1996, Williams 1977). In the case of Seeds of Changemaize was highlighted as an item of exchange, aswere potatoes, sugar, the horse, and disease. An-other selection might include, say, tobacco, alcohol,gunpowder, gold, or land: these are items includedin many Native American artistic responses to theQuincentenary (G. Peter Jemison's For Our LandThey Brought Gifts for example, which represented
1. Entrance to Seeds of Change; Five Hundred Years ofEncounter and Exchange, National Museum of NaturalHistory, Smithsonian Institution (1991) Exhibit design:Miles Fridberg Molinaroli, Inc. Photo: Michael Althaus.
the "Columbian exchange" as a commodified ex-change of land for alcohol) (fig. 2).
While many selections on labels are strategic(certainly the case for the focal items in Seeds ofChange), others are the result of generic conven-tions or unconscious assumptions on the part of anexhibition's curators and development team. Cer-tain generic conventions have, by now, been subjectto considerable critical attention, particularly thoseunderlying the distinctions between "primitive" and"civilized," "art" and "artifact" (Clifford 1988b, Marcus and Myers 1995, Price 1989, Vogel 1988). Theconventions that distinguish minimally labelled'art' objects from more extensively labelled collec-tions of primitive, folk, or historical "artifacts" pri-marily involves the referential function (Jakobson1969, Silverstein 1979) of labels — that is, the way
44 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 21 NUMBER 1
2. G. Peter Jemison, For Our Land They Brought Gifts, in The Submuloc Show / Columbus Wohs (1992). Photo courtesy of Atlatl.
labels speak about displayed objects, providing ex-planatory information (Baxandall 1991) consideredessential to understanding and appreciation. But,like all signs, museum labels simultaneously carrya number of nonreferential or pragmatic functions(Hanks 1996; Havranek 1964; Jakobson I960,Mertz and Parmentier 1985; Silverstein 1976,1979,1985; Silverstein and Urban 1996). These may beunderstood as the ways in which labels index as-pects of the very communicative events in whichthey participate. Perhaps because they are so oftenimplicit, the pragmatic messages conveyed by labelshave received considerably less scholarly and cura-torial attention than referential ones. But becausethey include messages about museum audiencesthemselves — and about audiences' relationships toboth the objects on display and the institution dis-playing them — the indexical aspects of labels maybecome central to highly emotional controversies(Baxandall 1991, Fernandez 1986).
Of the various pragmatic messages that aremost relevant to a consideration of museum labels,let us first consider the kinds of messages that labels may convey about an exhibition's audience or
audiences. As Haraway (1989) and Clifford (1991)have demonstrated, museum labels subtly index thepublic for which an exhibition is designed at thesame time that they more overtly interpret dis-played objects. The choice of central themes and im-ages; graphics and display techniques; languages,dialects, and registers; and labels for groups, places,and the audience itself all convey pragmatic mes-sages. We have already seen how the corn palace atthe entrance to Seeds of Change indexes an audi-ence that might otherwise be alienated from a con-cept-driven history exhibition. More generally,labels may index an intended audience as novicesor experts; provincials or cosmopolitans, outsidersor insiders; adults, children, or families; males orfemales; upper, middle, or working class; monolin-guals or multilinguals; seekers of amusement,knowledge, critical engagement, or validation, or,most often, some combination of all of these andmore. Labels index an intended public through theuse of words that imply a particular perspective("discovery," "encounter," or "invasion"); shifterssuch as "we" and "they," "here" and "there"; placenames such as "new world" or "our land", and racial,
EXCLUSIVE LABELS:INDEXING THE NATIONAL "WE" IN COMMEMORATIVE AND OPPOSITIONAL EXHIBITIONS 45
3. "Narrative Production." Curated by a team led byDavid Sandell for DisPlay /Displacement, Departmentof Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin(1996). Photograph on exhibition poster and book coverby Corinne A. Kratz. Photo: John Bodinger de Uriarte.
ethnic, national, or local markers ("Indians" and"Kwakiutl," on the one hand, and "Kwak-waka'wakw" and "Henry George of the Na-Kwa-Tehtribe," on the other) (Clifford 1991:230, 249).Through indexing an intended public in a myriad ofways, museum labels include or exclude, recognizeor ignore, engage or alienate, and claim solidaritywith or power over those who visit the exhibition(Brown and Gilman I960; Price 1989; Silverstein1976,1985; Vergo 1989).
Just as museum labels index their intendedaudiences, so too they index their authors. Whenauthors are unidentified, labels in a major institu-tion bear its authoritative voice. More rarely, labelsmay explicitly acknowledge their own positioningthrough revealing individual or collective author-
ship, and public or corporate sponsorship; citing con-sultants or authorities, and indicating points of con-troversy (Haraway 1991; Harris 1995a. 1995bSimilarly, through standing alone, being juxtaposedto contrasting messages, or inviting interaction andresponse, museum labels either construe them-selves as factual and authoritative endpoints of in-quiry or engage their audiences in a more open,dialogical process of interpretation (Beard and Hen-derson 1991; Gable, Handler and Lawson 1992).
Finally, in addition to these strictly pragmaticfunctions, labels may take on metapragmatic func-tions by directing attention reflexively back uponthemselves (Hanks 1996, Jakobson 1960, Silver-stein 1979). Metapragmatic labels have been foundin a number of recent experimental exhibitions, in-cluding ART/Artifact at New York's Center for Af-rican Art; ?EXHIBITION? at Oxford's AshmoleanMuseum; and The Label Show: Contemporary Artand the Museum at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts(Beard and Henderson 1991, Solomon-Godeau1994, Vogel 1988). These exhibitions playfullyplaced labels in question by treating them as theprimary focus of the exhibition — through typo-graphical violations, for example, or through a pro-liferation of signed, opinionated, and conflictinglabels in traditionally neutral and minimalist set-tings (cf. Adams 1997, Gurian 1991, Vogel 19911.
Similarly, Displacement, a student-curatedI
exhibition mounted in response to a local crisis ofrepresentation,at the University of Texas atAustin,4 subverted labelling conventions through avariety of techniques, including unconventionaltypography, placing accession records on displayand refusing explanatory labels altogether (Kinkel1997); appropriating labelling conventions frompopular media, including paper dolls, banquetmenus, and video (Biggs 1997, Shankar 1997); ask-ing photographic subjects to write their own labelsdirectly on prints (Bodinger de Uriarte 1997); usinglabels to obscure displayed objects; and encouragingviewers to participate in the labelling process byusing stick-on notes and grease pencils (fig. 3).
More conventionally, however, museum labelsfunction in a relatively transparently manner formost viewers. That is, like a picture window, and likemost indexes, labels generally direct attention awayfrom themselves and toward what they primarily
46 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 21 NUMBER 1
4. Irving Couse, The Captive (1892). In The West as America, National Museum of American Art, The SmithsonianInstitution (1991). Labelled as a "lurid treatment of a historical event" that "unconsciously expresses...fears ofmiscegenation" through a "network of intimations that thinly represses an actual sexual encounter." Photo courtesyPhoenix Art Museum.
index. If, however, labels bear a message that seri-ously challenges the knowledge, identities, expecta-tions, or agendas of a significant portion of theaudience, they may become subject to considerablecontroversy. Labels so overtly index an exhibition'sinterpretation, are so easily abstracted from it, andmay so sharply contrast with a public's expectationsthat a controversy over interpretive stance or com-municative style easily becomes a controversy overparticular labels, which come to stand as synecdo-ches for the entire exhibition. Such controversies,while potentially devastating for those involved, arealso extraordinarily instructive for those of us inter-ested in the process through which knowledges andcommunities are reflected, shaped, and contested inpublic institutions.
Among the most contentious disputes over mu-seum labels in recent years are those surroundingthe major exhibitions mounted in the United Statesbetween 1989 and 1992 in commemoration of the
quincentenary of Columbus's first voyage to thishemisphere. In discussing the labelling practices inofficial Quincentenary exhibitions I will focus upontwo that generated major controversies; First En-counters, a travelling show developed at the FloridaMuseum of Natural History, and the National Mu-seum of American Art's The West as America. Seedsof Change, an influential and largely noncontrover-sial exhibition, serves as a third example. Adaptinga concept used in the analysis of languages thathave both inclusive and exclusive forms of the first-person plural (Mtthlhausler and Harre 1990:168-206), I analyze how museum labels construct acollective subject—the "we" of the exhibition—thatmay exclude significant portions of the public (cf.Gurian 1991' I then consider in somewhat moredetail two oppositional Quincentenary exhibitions,each of which employed labels that challenged theexclusive "we" of the major exhibitions. One of thesein particular, the Science Museum of Minnesota's
EXCLUSIVE LABELS:INDEXING THE NATIONAL "WE" IN COMMEMORATIVE AND OPPOSITIONAL EXHIBITIONS 47
5. Sign advertising First Encounters /Native Views at the Science Museum of Minnesota 1992). Photo: PaulineTurner Strong.
First Encounters INative Views, offers a promisingmodel for the representation of a pluralistic na-tional subject in museums.
The Collective Subject of Quincentenaryand Oppositional Exhibitions
The first major Quincentenary exhibition in theUnited States was First Encounters: Spanish Explo-rations in the Caribbean and the United States,1492-1570 (Milanich and Milbrath 1989), whichopened at the Florida Museum of Natural Historyin 1989. A conventional ethnohistorical exhibition,First Encounters presented as its focal point — andas its main icon — a two-thirds scale replica of Co-lumbus's favorite ship, La Nina. The exhibition'snarrative of exploration was launched in Spain,moved through the Spanish "encounter" with theTainos; followed the explorations of Ponce de Leon,de Soto, and Coronado; and concluded, as if it werean afterthought, with "The Native Perspective" —declaring this to be elusive, as "we" only have Span-ish accounts. The non-native "we" and the native
"they" of the exhibition was further expressed in alabel that observed, "it is disheartening to learn thatour society is built on graves"—clearly, their graves.Opponents of First Encounters reported that school-children visiting the exhibition took the role of ex-plorers, boarding the ship and shooting imaginaryIndians on shore (Elliott 1989/90, IndigenousThought 1991). Despite its invocation of the seem-ingly inclusive and dialogical concept of "encoun-ters" in the exhibition's main label, the theme ofFirst Encounters was exploration, and its collectivesubject, its "we," was clearly Euro-American.
First Encounters displayed only one of severalreplicas of Columbus's ships created for the Quin-centenary. More than Columbus himself, of whomthere is no authoritative portrait, the Nina, Pinta,and Santa Maria serve as icons for the Eurocentricdiscourse of the "discovery" of the "new world." Rep-licas and images of Columbus's ships became keysites for opposition by Native American artists andactivists, including Russell Means, who posed infront of the Nina at the Florida Museum of Natural
48 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 21 NUMBER 1
6. Counter-label, First Encounters/Native Views, the Science Museum of Minnesota. The text reads: "What isoffensive about First Encounters? Euro-Americans are used to seeing indigenous people behind glass in museums.Indigenous people do not see themselves as exotic, extinct specimens." Photo:Pauline Turner Strong.
History with a sign labelling the exhibition a cele-bration of racism (Indigenous Thought 1991). As aresult of extended protests in Florida, First Encoun-ters was cancelled at some venues, and by the timeit appeared in Albuquerque and Minneapolis —both of which have large Native American popula-tions — it was accompanied by material and eventspresenting Native American perspectives and cri-tiques (Elliott 1989/90, Indigenous Thought 1991,Milbrath and Milanich 1991, Winkler 1991). As Iwill discuss below, at the Science Museum of Min-nesota the supplemental materials formed a full-blown counter-exhibition, Native Views, thateffectively challenged the interpretive stance, thedisplay techniques, and the communicative style ofFirst Encounters.
The National Museum of Natural History'sSeeds of Change: Five Hundred Years of Encounterand Exchange was much more thoroughly groundedin the theme of encounter, especially as developedin Alfred Crosby's concept of the Columbian ex-change (Crosby 1972, Hobhouse 1987, Viola and
Margolis 1991). The most broadly influential Quin-centenary exhibition in the U.S., Seeds of Changeused a variety of dramatic display techniques to pre-sent five items of material exchange between twoworlds conceived as equally old. Produced in travel-ling panel versions and accompanied by extensivepromotional material and an ambitious educationalagenda (National Council 1991, Ringle 1991, WhenWorlds Collide 1991), Seeds of Change was fairlysuccessful in shifting some portion of the public dis-course about Columbus from the tropes of explora-tion and discovery to the more dialogical tropes ofencounter and exchange.
To understand discovery and encounter astropes is to see them as poetic devices, as figures ofthe historical imagination (Fernandez 1986; Frie-drich 1979; Karp 1991;Kolodny 1992; Strong, forth-coming, White 1973). Discovery is a trope with arecognizable icon (Columbus's ships), a limited per-spective that presents itself as universal, and a setof metaphorical associations with highly valued ac-tivities in American culture (self-discovery, scien-
EXCLUSIVE LABELS:INDEXING THE NATIONAL "WE" IN COMMEMORATIVE AND OPPOSITIONS EXHIBITIONS 49
7. Scott Parsons, Em'pyre (detail). Multimedia installation in the Denver Civic Center, October 12, 1992. Photo:Pauline Turner Strong.
tific discovery, exploration, westward expansion,progress, ingenuity, originality). In short, "discov-ery" is central to the dominant national narrative ofthe United States. "Encounter," despite its sexualand extraterrestrial associations, has a much morelimited resonance: unlike Mexico, where the cog-nate term encuentro resonates with the nationalistnarrative of mestizaje, the United States lacks apopular discourse of cultural mixture.
Both the failure of First Encounters to realizethe potential of its title and the limited achievementof Seeds of Change can be understood in this context.In the first case, "encounter" was used superficiallyas the exhibition's main label without substantiallyaltering the hegemonic narrative of discovery or ex-panding its exclusive "we." In the second case, anexhibition developing the tropes of encounter andexchange served to represent a more inclusive na-tional "we" in a major national institution — nosmall achievement. However, as the example of thecorn palace suggests, these tropes were often inter-preted in a light and celebrative, rather than criti-cal, fashion. To be sure, Seeds of Change had its
serious moments, particularly in its treatment ofslavery and the devastating effects of European dis-eases upon Native Americans. But the overall effectof an exhibition developed under the politically neu-tral rubrics of "encounter" and "exchange" was toobscure power relations in both the past and thepresent. These tropes proved to be easily as-similable to the hegemonic national narrative ofprogress.
Both the studied neutrality of "encounter andexchange" and the Eurocentrism of "discovery" wereforcefully challenged in a number of Native Ameri-can art exhibitions in the United States and Can-ada. In Canada two major shows appeared innational museums: Land I Spirit /Power at the Na-tional Gallery of Canada and Indigena at the Cana-dian Museum of Civilization (McMaster and Martin1992, Nemiroff 1992, Rushing 1993, MacDonald1992). But in the United States. indigenous perspec-tives were mainly found outside of and counter tonational exhibitions — an index of the relative ex-clusion of indigenous people from the national "we"constructed during the Quincentenary. Indigenous
50 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 21 NUMBER 1
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8. Deborah Small, em'pyre (1991), as displayed in Scott Parsons's multimedia installation of the same title. DenverCivic Center, October 12, 1992. Photo: Pauline Turner Strong.
Quincentenary exhibitions presented what Algonquian-Tuscarora artist Simon Brascoupe called aView from the Shore — that is, an explicitly situatedindigenous view that exposed "discovery" and "en-counter" alike as tropes of the conqueror, offering"invasion," "conquest," "resistance, and "survival"in their place. Many indigenous art works, such asJemison's For Our Land They Brought Gifts (fig. 2),responded to the Quincentenary by transformingEuropean icons of discovery into icons of conquest;this piece appeared in a show curated by the notedNative American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith,The Submuloc Show I Columbus Wohs (1992), acounter-Quincentenary show whose title, like Viewfrom the Shore and For Our Land They Brought Giftsindexes a reversal of perspective. Other Native artists—in this show, the Canadian shows, and elsewhere —worked with personal and tribal histories, with nativematerials and landscapes, and with indigenous sacredsymbols, often tobacco, to provide images of — andmeans towards — "survival" and "resistance."
The oppositional trope of "conquest" only ap-peared in a U.S. national museum in the form of a
revisionist exhibition of frontier art, The West asAmerica: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier,1820-1920 (Truettner 199 la). Grounded in the newWestern history and art history, this exhibition atthe National Museum of American Art presentedfrontier art works—including Remingtons, Catlins,and Morans as well as popular and commercial art— as ideological justifications for capitalist expan-sion and exploitation rather than as records of ex-ploration and progress. Curator William Truettnerand his staff, perhaps lulled by the acceptance ofrevisionist perspectives in the academy, were unpre-pared for the force of opposition that pro-develop-ment conservative historians and politiciansmounted against the exhibition. Retreating beforea barrage of criticism and threats of funding cuts,the National Museum of American Art toned downthe most controversial labels (Strong 1991,Truettner 1991b, Wallach 1992).
Upon viewing The West as America, I felt that itwas not only its revisionist message that invitedcriticism, but the monological and authoritative na-ture of the labelling. While the title of the exhibition
EXCLUSIVE LABELSJNDEXING THE NATIONAL "WE" IN COMMEMORATIVE AND OPPOSITIONAL EXHIBITIONS 51
9. The Denver Art Museum, with tipis belonging to Scott Parsons's multimedia installation Em9pyre in foreground,October 12, 1992. Photo: Pauline Turner Strong.
labelled its message a reinterpretation, the exhibi-tion did not present the artwork it displayed as opento multiple interpretations. The complex and nu-anced arguments of the exhibition catalog, whencondensed in the form of labels, came across as over-bearing and reductionist. For example, the label toIrving Couse's TTie Captive (fig. 4) interpreted thepainting as an example of the "obsessive develop-ment" of the "question of racial mixing." A repressedsexual encounter is intimated, the label suggested,in the phallic objects pointing in the captive's direc-tion, the open entry to the tipi, and the captor's footagainst the captive's body. This is one reading, to besure, but it is not even the only possible Freudianreading. When presented as an authoritative inter-pretation, it tended to arouse skepticism in viewers.("I don't know," one elderly woman remarked to me,"I'd say that he looks sad and she looks dead." Iagreed that, necrophilia aside, there was certainlyroom for a more ambiguous reading.) Forceful label-ling that inspires thought and conversation is oneway to engage viewers — and the attentive audi-
ences and multiple notebooks filled with commentsattest to the exhibition's success by this measure.But I suspect that a more polyphonic labelling tech-nique might have been both more convincing to theopen minded and less objectionable to influentialcritics.
The kind of polyphonic labelling I have in mindwas successfully implemented at the Science Mu-seum of Minnesota, which embedded a counter-ex-hibition by local scholars and activists within FirstEncounters. The counter-exhibition, entitled NativeViews: From the Heart of Turtle Island challengedFirst Encounters so effectively that it overshadowedit, just as the indigenous figure overshadowed Co-lumbus's ship on the sign displayed outside the mu-seum (fig. 5). Native Views displayed a fewadditional items, but it was most effective in directlyand succinctly positioning and critiquing the label-ling of First Encounters.
"What is offensive about First Encounters?"asked a counter-label beside the replica of the Nina.It answered: "For many Euro-Americans this rep-
52 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 21 NUMBER 1
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10. Almanac of the Dead, a "National Historic Marker, U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service. IndianWars 1492-1992." Detail, Em'pyre by Scott Parsons (1992). Sign, facing the Denver Art Museum, pictures its "hurtfuldisplay desecrating the Ghost Dance." A quote from Wilson Weasel Tail reads: "The truth is the Ghost Dance did notend with the murder of Big Foot.. The people have never stopped dancing; they may call it by other names,but...throughout the Americas, .as the living dance, they are joined again with all our ancestors before them, whocry out, who demand justice, and who call the people to take back the Americas!" Photo: Pauline Turner Strong.
lica of the Nina is a source of pride. For indigenouspeople, the Nina symbolizes death and destruction."Beside a life-size portrayal of the exchange of tradegoods, a similar counter-label objected to presentingindigenous people in a case like an exotic, extinctspecies (fig. 6) — thereby calling into question thepresuppositions underlying natural history muse-ums in general (cf. Haraway 1989). The exhibition'sdisplay of Spanish armor was criticized, like theNina, for glorifying instruments of conquest. Theuse of "wilderness" and "new world" labels for whatwas home to Native Americans for thousands ofyears was effectively criticized, as was a totally gra-tuitous mannequin that could only be interpretedas a skulking warrior.
Most impressive about Native Views, in my ownview, is the way the counter-labels consistently iden-tified the points of view from which both the originallabels and the critique derived. That is, the counter-
exhibition did not invalidate or homogenize the ex-periences and perspectives of Europeans, but in-stead juxtaposed a contrasting indigenousperspective, allowing both the original labels andthe critique to be viewed as "situated knowledges"(Haraway 1991). This proved to be an extremely ef-fective strategy for voicing alternative truths,stimulating dialogue, and encouraging criticalthinking about the basis of any institutional claimof truth.
Another noteworthy experiment in labellingand juxtaposition took place in the context of a 1992demonstration against Denver's Columbus Day pa-rade — a demonstration led by members of theAmerican Indian Movement and co-sponsored by avariety of local organizations. Scott Parsons's out-door installation, Enfpyre (fig. 7), featuring aburned-out tipi village reminiscent of the SandCreek Massacre, was erected in Denver's Civic Cen-
EXCLUSIVE LABELS:INDEXING THE NATIONAL "WE" IN COMMEMORATIVE AND OPPOSITIONAL EXHIBITIONS 53
ter, the site of cowboy and Indian statues as well asa monument to Columbus. In the midst of scores offreshly charred, powerfully haunting tipi frames,Parsons erected a set of signs; all except the mainlabel, which displayed Deborah Small's (1991)em*pyre (fig. 8), imitated National Park Servicesigns. The signs offered, in official guise, an opposi-tional perspective on Western history: documentingmassacres, presenting apologies of religious leadersto indigenous people, and chastising the Denver ArtMuseum (located across the street) for displayingsacred Ghost Dance regalia (figs. 9,10).
Em9pyre faced the State Capitol building,where the Italian-American sponsors of the Colum-bus Day parade gathered but eventually withdrew.AIM leaders led a victory parade through the instal-lation, after which the artist and his assistants ex-tended the tipi pyre up to the Capitol itself, whereit served as a powerful, if temporary, indictment ofmy native state's treatment of its indigenous peo-ples. I will never again visit the grounds of Colo-rado's Capitol without being haunted by the sightand smell of charred tipi frames. Scott Parsons'spyre sparked in me an identification, partial thoughit might be, with the Cheyenne mothers who losttheir homes, families, lives, and dignity at SandCreek. Unfortunately, however, my experience wasnot widely shared: Em9pyre was on view for only aday, and Denver residents had been warned to avoidCivic Center in case violence broke out between thehighly polarized Italian-American and NativeAmerican groups.
Native Views and Em*pyre both appropriatedthe authoritative medium of institutional labels inorder to contest the dominant tropes and exclusive"we" of American national history. Em*pyre exem-plifies the transformative power of an aestheticallyrich and evocative enlargement of the collective"we";Native Views, for its part, exemplifies the peda-gogical effectiveness of juxtaposing and situatingalternate forms of knowledge rather than silencingone in favor of another (or excluding nearly all in-terpretation, as in the case of the Smithsonian's dis-play of the Enola Gay) (White, this issue; Yoneyama1995). The staffs and constituencies of national mu-seums, even while operating under a daunting setof tensions and constraints (Adams 1997; Kurin,this issue), may find these regional efforts at criticallabelling instructive. Rather than offering amonological interpretation and responding defen-sively to the inevitable challenges from those who
find their perspectives excluded, curators mightproactively build contending, clearly situated per-spectives into an exhibition from the outset, andseek ways to effectively enlist audiences as co-authors (Baxandall 1991, Duranti and Brenneis1986, MacDonald 1992, Perin 1992).
Polyphonic and dialogical exhibition strategiestake advantage of the multiplicitous indexical po-tentialities of labelling, and are one way of crea-tively realizing the compelling vision of thedemocratic museum as forum rather than temple(Adams 1997, Cameron 1972, Lavine and Karp1991). Both an appreciation of the semiotic complex-ity of labelling and the example of oppositional ex-periments in labelling offer useful models for thoseseeking to represent, engage, and constitute a moreinclusive and pluralistic national "we" in museums.
AcknowledgmentsThis article benefits from the critical readings
of Susan Bean, Richard Handler, Elizabeth Keating,Daniel Segal, Barrik Van Winkle, and two anony-mous readers for Museum Anthropology; unpub-lished lectures by Robert McCormick Adams, JanElliott, Annette Kolodny, Donald McVickers, Debo-rah Small, William Truettner, and especially Mi-chael Silverstein; discussions with W JacksonRushing; the organizational efforts, encourage-ment, and patience of Geoffrey White; and the in-sights and creativity of the student curators ofDisPlay/Displacement (Will Barnett, MelissaBiggs, John Bodinger de Uriarte, Vania Z. Cardoso,Drew Davidson, Rachel Feit, Bonnie Claudia Harri-son, Marianne Kinkel, Eriko Kobayashi, HollyOgren, Cecilia L. Salvatore, David Sandell, GuhaShankar, Kristen Tegtmeier, and Claire Van Ens).Fieldwork and conference participation were facili-tated by funding from the University of Missouri-St.Louis, the University of Texas at Austin, and theClaremont Graduate School, and by the hospitalityof Patricia Aufderheide and Stephen Schwartzman,Barbara Ronnigen, Daniel Segal and Laurie Shrage,and Harriet Turner Strong. I am grateful to all.
Notes
1. As introductions by Mertz and Parmentier (1985) andHanks (1996) explain in detail, the model discussedhere synthesizes the pragmatic emphases of Peirceansemiotics, Prague School functionalism, Anglo-Ameri-can speech act theory, and the ethnography of commu-nication. It might, with slightly different shades ofmeaning, be called a "practice," "functional," "coramu-
54 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 21 NUMBER 1
nication," or "discourse" model, but semiotics remainsthe most broad and ambitious framework for the studyof the relationship between linguistic and non-linguis-tic signs and selves (Singer 1989).
2. See Strong (forthcoming) for more extensive analysesof Quincentenary exhibitions and controversies.
3. "Context" is an ambiguous term. While linguists gen-erally associate context with a speech event (Durantiand Goodwin 1992), it is widely used by anthropolo-gists and curators to refer to an object's or an idea'srelations to a world outside of a given speech event.Except when qualified, the term is used in the broaderanthropological sense in this article.
4. In closing The Ethnographer's Magic, Stocking(1992:363) muses over a controversy at the Universityof Chicago concerning the mapping of student fieldsites with stick pins on a large world map. Dis-Play I Displacement originated as a response to asomewhat similar crisis of representation over theappropriate use of display cases in a new anthropologyseminar room at the University of Texas at Austin.The controversy concerned visual representations of"others," specifically an exhibition of photographs ofAfricans by Corinne A. Kratz (a graduate student inthe department at the time). The focal exhibit inDisPlay I Displacement (fig. 3) posed conflicting retro-spect comments about the controversy with an exhi-bition poster and book cover bearing two of Kratz'sphotographs (see Kratz 1994a, 1994b). The exhibit'saesthetic presentation, its polyvocality, its invitationto consider various sites of visual representation, andits provision for direct audience response (on stick-onnotes) created the atmosphere of a forum where pre-viously (for several years since the controversy) therehad been an impasse — one that took the form ofstarkly empty display cases.
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Pauline Turner Strong is Assistant Professor of An-thropology at the University of Texas, Austin.
