Revisiting the Relationship between Indigenous Agency and Museum Inventories: An Object-Centered Study of the Formation of Lübeck's Jacobsen Collection (1884/1885) from the Northwest Coast of America By Angela Hess Cover: Objects from Lübeck’s Jacobsen collection. Photo: Angela Hess, July 2019 Revisiting the Relationship between Indigenous Agency and Museum Inventories: An Object-Centered Study of the Formation of Lübeck's Jacobsen Collection (1884/1885) from the Northwest Coast of America Author: Angela Hess Student number: s2080087 MA Thesis Archaeology (4ARX-0910ARCH) Supervisor: Dr. M. De Campos Françozo Specialization: Heritage and Museum Studies University of Leiden, Faculty of Archaeology Leiden, June 5, 2020, final version 1 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. 5 Chapter One: Introduction .................................................................................................. 6 Defining the Research Scope: Aims and Objectives, Hypotheses, Limitations ............. 10 Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks .................................................................. 12 Working Definitions ...................................................................................................... 14 Outline of Chapters ....................................................................................................... 17 Chapter Two: Contexts and Concepts for the Study of the 1884/85 Jacobsen Collection19 2.1 First Nations Now and Then: Mapping Creator Communities of the Jacobsen Collection ...................................................................................................................... 20 2.2 Trade Encounters in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Contact Zone ....................................................................................................................................... 28 2.3 “Everything is hybrid”? Reflecting on Hybridity as an Analytical Tool for the Study of Colonial Collections ....................................................................................................... 31 Chapter Three: On the Distributed Agency within Northwest Coast Artefact Trade Networks ........................................................................................................................... 35 3.1 Manifestations of Post-Contact Trade Networks within Lübeck’s Jacobsen Collection ....................................................................................................................................... 35 3.2 Indigenous Crafting Between Assimilation Policies and Euro-American Acquisitiveness .............................................................................................................. 46 3.2.1 Argillite Carvings from Haida Gwaii.................................................................. 48 3.2.2 Basketry from West-Vancouver ....................................................................... 52 Concluding Remarks ...................................................................................................... 57 Chapter Four: The Bella-Coola-Völkerschau (1885/86) and the post-1886 Division of the Jacobsen Collection ........................................................................................................... 59 4.1 Historical Perspectives on the Bella-Coola-Völkerschau ......................................... 61 4.2 Artefacts on Tour: The Travelling Northwest Coast Ethnographic Side-Show ....... 65 4.3 Made vs. Worn in Germany: Indigenous Agency During the Bella-Coola-Völkerschau ....................................................................................................................................... 69 4.4 Unpacking the Jacobsen Collection(s) ..................................................................... 76 3 4.4.1 Collector’s Agencies: The Role of the Jacobsen brothers’ Collecting Strategies in Relation to the Composition of Lübeck’s Collection ............................................. 79 4.4.2 Ethical Challenges and Considerations for Future Studies .............................. 81 Concluding Remarks ...................................................................................................... 83 Chapter Five: Conclusion ................................................................................................... 86 Abstract ............................................................................................................................. 89 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 91 Internet Pages ............................................................................................................. 101 Newspaper Articles ..................................................................................................... 102 Archival Material ......................................................................................................... 102 List of Figures, Tables, Appendices ................................................................................. 104 Appendices ...................................................................................................................... 106 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank various people, who all contributed equally to making this thesis possible through their ongoing support and exchange of ideas. Firstly, I wish to express my gratitude to my professor and thesis supervisor Dr. Mariana De Campos Françozo for accompanying me through my research process. I thank her for inspiring me to work with museum collections, for having confidence in my ideas, while providing many valuable and indispensable insights along the way. Her readiness to continuously support me and the many encouraging words I was given, whenever I stumbled across difficulties, were vital to the development of this thesis and I am deeply grateful for it. My great appreciation is also due to Dr. Lars Frühsorge, head curator of the Völkerkundesammlung in Lübeck that hosts the Jacobsen collection. I am grateful that an innocent e-mail inquiry after internship opportunities culminated in this thesis project, which would never have been realized without his willingness to introduce me to this collection on a first visit to Lübeck in March 2019 and to subsequently guide my three- week research on-site in June and July 2019. I also thank him for our ongoing exchange of ideas since then and for giving me the possibility to contribute to an upcoming exhibition that entails objects from this significant collection. At the same time, I would like to thank Elke Krüger, who helped me with the intricacies of their database, and provided me with everything digitized, from object photographs to inventory books. I also thank the various participants of the meeting hosted by the work group on colonial provenances of the Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung e.V. at the Museum am Rothenbaum. Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK) in Hamburg (27 – 28 June 2019) for sharing their own work and thoughts on the different Jacobsen collections with me. Additionally, I acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Heidelies Wittig, responsible for the MARKK’s document archive, and Catharina Winzer, head of the photo archive of the same institution, in supplying me with all the historical documents relating to the collector Johan Adrian Jacobsen. Finally, I would like to stress my deep gratitude for my family and friends. I thank them for always having my back and believing in my progress, for showing genuine interest and, at times, patience whenever I could not withhold my passion for this research, and for providing their unconditional support throughout this journey. 5 Chapter One: Introduction In 2017, the Chugach Alaska Corporation, an organization representing the political interests of the Alaska Indigenous Peoples within the Chugach region, requested the return of a group of nine objects from a funerary context, comprising wooden masks and a baby basket, that had been in the possession of The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, SPK), to its creator communities1. As part of the SPK, the Berlin Ethnological Museum had been curating the objects since the late 1880s and upon receiving the request, engaged in provenance research that soon revealed that the objects in question had been looted by Norwegian captain, explorer and amateur ethnologist Johan Adrian Jacobsen (1852 – 1947) between 1882 and 1884. In May 2018, the objects were successfully restituted and subsequently curated by Chugach community centers and local museums (The New York Times 16 May 2018). This example illustrates recent developments relating to colonial collections in European institutions that have not only informed new research approaches and projects but have also become a matter of politics. On the one hand, colonial provenance research has begun to shed light on the complex webs of diverse actors contributing to the formation of museum collections (e.g. Förster et al. 2018). Especially regarding the establishment of many German ethnological museums, Adrian Jacobsen has played a vital role in assembling thousands of objects from various continents throughout the late nineteenth century. Originally commissioned by the former Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde (Royal Museum for Ethnology) in Berlin, Jacobsen’s collections are