PhD Opportunity: The historic role of missionary societies in shaping children’s understandings of Britain’s place in the world

A Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentship between the National Maritime Museum and the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
 

The Hope of the World, Harold Copping

Start date: October 2019

Application Deadline: Friday 3rd May 2019 at 23h59min
Interviews will take place on Tuesday 21stMay 2019 in Greenwich

Supervisors
Dr Chris Wingfield (Sainsbury Research Unit)
Dr Robert Blyth (National Maritime Museum)

Project Overview 
In The Making of English National Identity (2003) Krishan Kumar argued that English identity was characterised by a form of ‘missionary nationalism’:

a nationalism that finds its principle not so much in equating state and nation as in extending the supposed benefits of a particular nation’s rule and civilization to other peoples. 

Kumar did not, however, particularly probe the ‘missionary’ component of ‘missionary nationalism’ – the degree to which exposure to missionary propaganda from a young age profoundly shaped the political, cultural and social attitudes adopted by many children in later life.

For generations of children growing up in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain,
 it was at Sunday school that they first came into contact with images of people living in other parts of the world. The scale of this impact should not to be underestimated. Susan Thorne (2006, 143) has suggested that ‘virtually every working-class child attended Britain’s massively popular Sunday Schools at one point or another’.

Images commissioned by Britain’s missionary societies formed part of their extensive educational programmes, and frequently embodied ideas about Britain’s providential role in the world (Brewer 2005). We might read these in terms of nineteenth-century ideas about ‘the White Man’s burden’, and as part of what we might now call historical constructions of ‘whiteness’, or perhaps more controversially 'the white saviour complex'.

As Britain embarks on a new chapter in its relationship with the wider world, it becomes increasingly important to re-consider the ways in which this relationship has been imagined in the past. While ‘decolonisation’ has become a buzzword in both museum and academic circles, it has frequently been associated with the attitudes and positions associated with ‘high imperialism’. This project is intended to develop a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which forms of benevolent paternalism were shaped and propagated in the context of British missionary societies, through their engagements with children and young people across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Full details of the project and information about how to applay are available on the UEA website.

Beyond the Spectacle: Native North American Presences in Britain

Today we have another project profile, this time from Jack Davy.  If you wish to have a project, collection or object you are working on profiled on the MEG blog then please email web@museumethnographersgroup.org.uk  

After visiting Cherokee objects in the British Museum stores; three-hundred-year-old baskets and more modern pieces collected in the 1970s, the Warriors of Anikithua, dance troupe of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians sat down with the Beyond the Spectacle team for an interview. Together we discussed the provenance, the history and the technique of the objects on display, and when asked for their first reaction to the visit, their response was “We thought there would be more. Where is it all?” 

Warriors of Anikithua, Piccadilly Circus, 1st January 2018. Image by Professional Images, courtesy of the Arts and Humanities Research Council

This question feeds to a larger one which lies at the heart of the Beyond the Spectacle project, which is to question where to find evidence for the historical relationships between Native North Americans and the British public in Britain itself. Funded by the AHRC and jointly administered by the Universities of Kent and East Anglia, Beyond the Spectacle assembles a team of scholars from literary and cultural studies, history and anthropology, to uncover the hidden stories of Native travellers to Britain and through a series of collaborative programmes to draw direct connections between these histories and contemporary Native North American visitors to this country. 

The Warriors of Anikithua, accompanied by senior members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, did not travel to London in isolation. Invited to appear in the New Year’s Day parade, they were deliberately and consciously following in the footsteps of their ancestors, most particularly the delegation of 1762 to the court of King George III, led by Ostenaco, whose at times riotous sojourn across London in the summer of that year laid the foundationsof the Anglo-Cherokee relationship for decades to come. Their visit was photographed for Beyond the Spectacle though a grant provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

During their visit to the British Museum, the Warriors sought to connect with these ancestors by engaging with the objects they had left behind, but found themselves disappointed with how little remained. The discussion was not one of repatriation, but of knowledge, questioning why so little was publicly known, why so little was publicly accessible for the Cherokee on this seminal moment in the history of the British and the Cherokee. 

This is a problem with which Beyond the Spectacle has grappled throughout its year and a half in existence. Native North American visitors are not uncommon in the historical record – initial searches revealed hundreds of encounters in the historical archives, from diplomats like Ostenaco (and of course Pocahontas a century before); entertainers such as the Ojibwe showmen of the 1840s who performed at Windsor Castle, the Mohawk lacrosse teams who toured Britain in the 1870s and 1880s and Buffalo Bill’s famous Wild West  Sioux ofthe 1880s-1900s; soldiers such as the Canadian volunteers of the First and Second World Wars ; and modern visitors like the AIM activists who toured Ireland and Wales inthe 1970s, artists who ran shows at venues like Bristol’s own Rainmaker Gallery and modern groups who combine a little of all of these categories, such as the Warriors of Anikithua.

Together these groups have made thousands of public appearances before hundreds of thousands of British people, and collectively have generated an understanding, partial and incomplete but largely positive, of what it means to be Native North American among the British public. This understanding, this engagement between the colonial and colonised, between the former Imperial centre and its periphery, has lasting effects in awareness, in law, and in popular and academic collaboration, all of which Beyond the Spectacle seeks to probe.

To this end, the project is seeking to effect change in a number of areas:

·         To promote dialogue through residencies of Native artists – last summer Laguna Pueblo artist Marla Allison completed amonth-long residency in Bristol at Rainmaker, and this summer of 2019 Kwakwaka’wakw artist Sonny Assu will undertake one in Norwich, at least two more are in the works.

·         To raise prominence of Native American histories in the UK through events and installations, such as our involvement in the coming re-erection of the Salford totem pole.

·         To develop an archive for future research, combining summaries of historical and press archives pertaining to Native North American visitors with an extensive series of interviews with contemporaryNative visitors, such as the actor Eugene Brave Rock,  the artist Sierra Tasi Baker and numerous private students, tourists and scholars who have given their time to the project. This will enable those who follow in our footsteps to make best use of the vast body of data we are still assembling.

·         To promote scholarship through published worksand academic symposia, including one in 2018 hosted by the University of Bristol,another this coming summer at East Anglia and future events in Canterbury andParis.

 

· To further public education, both through formal teaching resources using material from our research to educate school children on Native American history and contemporary ways of life, as well as locally-focused walking tours and historical references for non-academic  audiences to enable people to better understand their own personal, local history with Native North Americans.

·         To enable more Native visitors to travel to Britain, through specific grants, such as the Canada Council grant obtained for Kwakwaka’wakw artist Sierra Tasi Baker to attend the opening of an exhibit at the Horniman museum to which she contributed (image below). Or more generally though improving access, to enable both visiting Native Americans and the broader British public to better access not only the archives and the sites of history, but the material evidence left behind.

Sierra Tasi Baker and the Kwakwaka’wakw interactive at the Horniman Museum, June 2018. Image courtesy of Skyspirit Consulting.

Though Beyond the Spectacle works as a team on all aspects of this project, one of my own personal ambitions is to promote better knowledge and access to museum collections; Native North American holdings in museums in the UK are enormous and, as many were formed at the first point of contact, hold immense significance for Native American visitors. Though of course the British Museum’s collections are huge and available online, much of this material is held in smaller regional collections too-often unknown to Native visitors. 

To this end we are slowly building an online guide toprominent Native collections in the UK, starting last year with the South-East and building in time to cover the whole country. In time, this resource should help all visitors, but in particular Native American visitors, to better access and engage with historic collections, and to help answer the question of where everything, where the material evidence of this long and complex history, has found a home.

To learn more about the work of Beyond the Spectacle please visit our website and blog for regular updates on the progression of our research and our collaborations with Native North American communities. If you feel that you, your community or your institution has material of value to our project, or if you wish to collaborate with is on one or more of our research programmes, please do get in touch at beyondthespectacle@kent.ac.uk

Looking for RGR Piper: plea for information

Aaron Glass recently came across two small collections from the Northwest Coast of North America in the ethnology museums in Munich and Frankfurt that were sold around 1910/1911 by a man named RGR Piper, who was from Bishop's Stortford and apparently was an antique furniture dealer. Neither museum has any information about him or the sources of his collections, and he doesn't show up as a donor to the major UK ethnology museums or other major Northwest Coast collections. 

If anybody has any information on potential pieces acquired by him in smaller UK or European museums, he'd love to know about it . Please contact him directly on glass@bgc.bard.edu.

Galloway Trust PhD scholarship, University of Aberdeen

The Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen has just advertised the Galloway Trust PhD scholarship.  Candidates with research interests in any area of Anthropology that fits within the department’s research themes (one of which is Museums and Histories of Science) and who either already have a Masters in Anthropology with research training, or are currently studying for one, are welcome to apply. The scholarship is open to Home/EU students and covers fees and a stipend for three years. The closing date is 31 January 2019. 

Information is available on the University of Aberdeen website.