The following is an edited transcript of a conversation between exhibit curator Aaron Glass and design contributor Corrine Hunt, recorded in New York City on August 9, 2018.

Click here to download a PDF of the exhibit brochure, which includes this dialogue along with illustrations from the exhibit.

Aaron Glass [AG]
So Corrine, what is your connection to Franz Boas and George Hunt?

Corrine Hunt [CH]
Well, I am the great-granddaughter of George Hunt, who worked with Franz Boas.

[AG]
Did you grow up hearing stories about the work that your great-grandfather did?

[CH]
Not in my early life. When I went to Simon Fraser University, I started hearing a little more about both of them. I knew who George was, but I hadn’t really heard about the work that he did. That came later.

[AG]
Was that through study or through talking to family members? Or Both?

[CH]
I had seen some texts lying around, and then through study a little. Later on, it seemed like the work that he did just kept seeping deeper and deeper into our lives, and we became more aware of it. People, probably in the 80s, really started searching out the texts and delving into them. And I think when our Big House opened in Fort Rupert in 1992, we started looking to find out more about the dances and the names. The Boas and Hunt texts were a resource for us.

So tell me who you are! When did you first hear of George Hunt and Franz Boas?

[AG](Laughing)
I did my undergrad and graduate training in anthropology. For my PhD, I studied with an anthropologist who trained with an anthropologist who was one of Boas’s students. So, according to scholarly genealogy, I am in a sense a great-grand student of Franz Boas.

I have also been spending time in Alert Bay, BC, for about twenty-five years. And I found that when I first went there as a student to do volunteer work at the U’mista Cultural Centre, a lot of the first conversations that I had with people were about my identity as an anthropologist with German-Jewish roots, like Boas. People knew him as such, and they made that connection with me, and that’s always given me an additional sense of connection to Boas.

I started working with the Kwakwaka’wakw more seriously as a graduate student, while also going to art school. As an artist, I was doing projects excavating my own family archive, and thinking about ways in which letters, correspondences, photographs and object collections mediate our sense of connection to our ancestors. My interest, as an anthropologist, in how this works among Indigenous people, and how it works in general, really became a point of overlap for me in my art practice and in my scholarly work… and everything in between.

[CH]
Can you tell me what it was about Alert Bay that first sparked your interest?

[AG]
I was in college in Portland, Oregon, and my exposure to anthropology was very historical and theoretical. When I started reading more about people on the Northwest Coast, I was really attracted to the art in the region. But most of what I read was about the way people used to live in the 19th century, because I was reading Boas and other old scholars. I started to look for volunteer opportunities to spend time in a community to help bridge the gap between then and now, to help me understand what contemporary Native life was like, as well as what contemporary anthropology might look like.

A series of conversations led me to U’mista, but it was only in preparation for that summer that I started reading about Alert Bay and realized what a historically significant community and cultural center it was. Being there, and seeing Franz Boas’s books and Edward Curtis’s photos in people’s homes as well as in the cultural center library, led me to be interested in the long-term effects of this history of anthropology in these communities.

[CH]
Was it a surprise to see the depth of information collected by Boas and Hunt that was there?

[AG]
Yeah, for sure! I mean, I knew how voluminous their work together was. But I didn’t have a lot of comparative experience at the time. I hadn’t worked or spent time in a lot of other Native communities. That only became apparent to me over the years, working with other peoples, and in other places. So I became really interested in the way in which Kwakwaka’wakw use that stuff, and critique it—what kind of complicated, often very ambivalent, relationship people have with a century of anthropology and ethnography in various media. There’s the books, but there’s also museum catalogues in all the carving sheds, and filmmakers using old film footage, and all the photos kicking around.

[CH]
Yeah. As long as I’ve known, growing up in Alert Bay, anthropologists have been coming there. Some members of our family have actually studied anthropology, which is kind of strange in a way. But I wonder what it is about us as a people that kept all these other people coming? You know, what was it about our little villages that became so interesting to so many people? And it’s been a constant for over a century.

For me, it was important to learn that George was a big part of that collection process. In the beginning, just seeing him as a person who worked with Boas, as a kind of sidebar or something, not really fully involved in the process, and finding out later, or feeling, that he was much more involved than we knew. You know, Hunt was half white and half Tlingit, and he wasn’t a Kwakwaka’wakw at all, but he learned and married into it, and became so knowledgeable himself and so much a part of it. And it’s really a wonder for me to imagine that—to see how much work he did in his life. I wish I had a chance to meet him and hang out with him, like this, in New York City! I know he traveled here.

[AG]
He did. He worked with Boas here as well as in Chicago and in Fort Rupert.

[CH]
That’s pretty cool. He’s a huge figure in our lives.

[AG]
Yeah. A founding ancestor, like Franz Boas is for so many of us in our field.

[CH]
Plus there’s this gap in time since things were collected and now, and in the potlatch, in the way ceremonies have changed in the villages and in the Big Houses. That’s where this becomes important, because our people danced through a long, dark period in our history when the Canadian government banned the potlatch between 1884 and 1951. Because of the ban, we had to shorten our ceremonies and give up the sort of details that really make something come alive. Finding some of those details within the texts—to see the conversation that happened between Boas and Hunt and to continue to work through their initial research—is really wonderful.

Then with this 1897 Critical Edition project, knowing that the research is taken further and that mistakes in the original book are being corrected, mostly using Hunt’s own notes, I think gives a sense of the fluidity of the information. And maybe takes it away from that sort of static feeling of something buried in time. I’m excited for people to see the exhibition: hopefully in New York, people will get a broader understanding of Boas and Hunt’s work; and in Alert Bay, my community will really just dig in and absorb it and talk about it. I think it’s going to be a really important time for us.

So can you tell me a bit more about the larger Critical Edition project, and its relation to the exhibit?

[AG]
I trained as an anthropologist during the late years of what has often been called a “crisis of representation” in the discipline. Anthropology took a long, hard look at itself, and especially its implication in the history of colonialism in North America and elsewhere. I’ve searched for a way to combine a critique of the colonial roots of the field with a recovery of the agency of Indigenous people who chose to work with ethnographers under radically imbalanced power relations. Basically, if it wasn’t for people like George Hunt and other Indigenous collectors, translators, assistants, brokers, and co-authors, the production of anthropological knowledge would never have been possible in the first place. So I’ve done a number of projects with U’mista that aim to unearth, revisit, and “recuperate” parts of the anthropological archive in order to make that material relevant again, in the present, for the Indigenous people for whom it has been long inaccessible.

Our team’s goal for the Critical Edition project, which the exhibit is a kind of introduction to, is to draw together massive amounts of material in various media (texts, photographs, museum collections, and sound recordings) that have been distributed in archives, libraries and museums all over the world, and to bring that heritage material back into dialogue with the 1897 book, but especially with the families who have specific links to the materials. And that’s where working closely and collaboratively with community members such as yourself has been essential from the beginning of the project. On the one hand it’s a project about the history of anthropology, and on the other hand it’s a project about contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw life, and finding ways to bring those two into direct relationship with one another. The larger Critical Edition does that and, working together, we hope the exhibit will do that too.

Ok, so knowing all of that, what is the 1897 book to you? What has this book become to you over the years, and especially more recently while working on the exhibit project?

[CH]
Well, you know, there’s a mask in there, “Lucy’s mask” we call it, though that’s probably not its proper name. It’s my great-grandmother’s mask, that’s been in the Berlin Ethnological Museum since it was collected around 1882. So the book very personally brings me to objects and songs that have been kept in these repositories. I’ll visit Berlin and see this mask, and then my cousin David Knox and I will reproduce it and bring it back to life, and find out from our family what they think about the past. How did it—how does it fit into our lives today? In the beginning, as I said, the book felt like this very static thing, but when you get into it, there are objects, there are stories, there are songs that have been recorded, that we will be able to listen to. Not many families get to do that. So the book has become a lot—it has become three-dimensional. And it will continue to do so until the exhibit opening. I was surprised, myself, at how dynamic it is. And how every time we talk, I feel something more is happening. And that’s very exciting.

[AG]
Can you talk briefly about other ways in which you or your family or members of your community have utilized the book?

[CH]
Well, we have revived many names and songs, as a kind of reinforcement of the things we know and the knowledge that has been shared by different people in various villages. For the last two decades, there have been people who have been pulling things out of the book and sharing them with community and bringing them into the potlatch. And it has helped a revival, of sorts, of the intimacies of the dances and songs. For example, master and apprentice carvers in Alert Bay are going to reproduce a set of unusual rattles that are now in Berlin, but whose exact use and meaning have been dormant for about a century. It will be interesting, once the book is revised, to see how much further it’s going to be used in this way.

[AG]
That is certainly part of my interest in the larger project. This is a book that has been a central text in the history of anthropology: Boas’s first monograph on Northwest Coast Indigenous cultures, the result of his first ten years of research on the coast; one of the first professional ethnographies based on first-person field work, which is announced on the title page; a multi-media ethnography with texts and objects and photographs and musical recordings. This book has had an influence on generations of scholars, museum collectors, curators, and artists—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. And yet this book is also a vehicle for living cultural heritage in a way that not every community has access to. It is implicated in all of these complicated historical moments.

In doing all the archival work with my colleagues on the larger Critical Edition project, there have been three real key revelations that have changed our understanding about the historical conditions under which this book was created:

1. As you’ve mentioned, the potlatch was banned the entire time Boas spent working with the Kwakwaka’wakw (from 1886 until his death in 1942). But almost nowhere in Boas’s published output does he mention the fact that all the stuff he was describing was against the law at the time. It’s remarkable! And it changes the way we understand everything about the work that he was doing with Hunt, and the reasons that people may have been selling masks and recording dances and putting their stories down on paper with George and others.

2. We realized the extent to which the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (the Chicago World’s Fair), was a major site of the field work for both Boas and Hunt—that a lot of the stuff they learned, which then went into the book, they learned in Chicago over the seven months they worked with the twenty Kwakwaka’wakw, most of them Hunt’s family or extended associates. This group at the fair, getting paid to present culture for an international audience, thousands of miles away from home, provided a lot of the information that has now been received as “traditional Kwakiutl culture.” That’s interesting and requires some examination.

3. The more my project co-director, Judith Berman, dug into the paper trail, correspondence between Boas and Hunt, and archival manuscripts, the more she came to realize that Hunt not only provided collection documentation and initial transcription of stories and language, but he drafted whole portions of the book, including the very important and influential chapter in which Boas recounts his eye-witness experience of the Winter Ceremonials at Fort Rupert in 1894. Basically, Boas took sketchy field notes at the events; the next day, Hunt came and explained to Boas everything that he had just witnessed; Boas revised his notes to draft out a description of the events; and George revised Boas’s notes in order to produce the first draft of what Boas then edited to become this famous “eye-witness” account. It’s completely co-authored.

So, I want to ask you: from having worked on the project and having come to appreciate these layers, what new insights has this provided to you about the way in which the things in the book—the objects, knowledge, stories, songs—were collected back in the day by Boas, by Hunt, by other people like them? And what role the original owners had in that process?

[CH]
It’s been quite a revelation. Understanding the process made a big difference. Learning, for example, that they attempted to collect the chief’s seat, the settee in the exhibit, for so long and it was only after the chief had had his use with it that it was allowed to go. That there was some decision making, on the part of the owners, regarding the pieces that were being collected. That they weren’t just taken, which I think is the universal feeling—that collectors went and grabbed things and took them from their places. It also gives me a feeling that, even though objects were sold, those objects weren’t lost, that they were objects that could be replaced. The ceremonies would still exist. The songs could never be “taken” even if they were recorded. So it gave me a sense that it was less of a one-sided affair, and a sense that the culture could never be lost through “losing” the objects. Especially during this time, during the potlatch ban, it gives a sense of the willingness of the people, to know that they did not stop. How powerful that is. Even though the government was ready to go in and take everything, it couldn’t. So there’s a sense of a kind of revolutionary spirit to keep oneself intact while the colonial powers were attacking. That was really important to me.

I also think the relationship between Boas and Hunt is really important. I feel like it was a real friendship. They got to know each other and it brought a different perspective to George—wanting to know, wanting to collect this information, to collect the songs. We know so much about Grandma Lucy [Hunt] through this—about her, where her father, her mother came from. It is just so wonderful to listen to the stories. And that may not have happened—that would not have happened—if he had not met Boas. So we as the family are left with a beautiful legacy, that will always be there. And hopefully we can take what we know and feel comfort in that, or feel strength and empowered by the knowledge.

[AG]
I’ve been thinking a lot about the motivation of the people who went to Chicago in 1893 to sing and dance in a way that they were prohibited from doing at home. Yes, that created the condition for Boas and Hunt to document those cultural practices in the book, even though they don’t say explicitly that the fair was the context for that documentation. (In fact, they erase the presence of the fair as the context of that documentation, to make the knowledge seem more authentic.) But at the same time, it presented opportunities for people to keep dancing, to keep singing, when these practices were imperiled at home under the potlatch law.

Boas, like most anthropologists at the time, was certainly motivated by an urge to “salvage” what he presumed to be the vanishing traces of authentic Indigenous culture before Native people would be assimilated into North American society. And yet, what strikes me is that in his 1897 letter to Hunt—in which he asks Hunt to communicate the book’s value to the Kwagu’l chiefs—Boas speaks in a Kwakwaka’wakw metaphor: he says, “This book is a box, it’s a storage box for your laws and stories, so that they won’t be forgotten.” Yes, he has Western science in mind, right? He’s helping record this material for posterity in case it disappears. But he’s speaking to the Kwakwaka’wakw using their idiom of the storage box—what we’re calling “the story box” for this exhibit—to say, “Your knowledge is worth preserving for your descendants.” And my sense is that both Boas and Hunt would be gratified by the knowledge that the book is being used that way – as a repository of knowledge from the past for use in the present. Not “salvaged” knowledge, but living knowledge, living heritage.

[CH]
Yeah. The book itself is adjunct to the heritage that continued through the potlatch ban. Maybe the documentation has helped along the way, but paired together they’re a powerful unit. Not many people have that repository or that “story box” in such detail, which I think is one of the important things—not just the words but the way the songs are written in the book, you know, how they were recorded on these cylinders. It blows my mind to imagine that kind of information is available for us. And this whole process, this whole project, is bringing the stories back out of that box and giving the book back to the people as a living document.

[AG]
Can you talk about how the metaphor and imagery of the box—and actual boxes—have been inspiring your work as the designer of the exhibit?

[CH]
Once you showed me this Boas letter from 1897, I just felt that suddenly it was very simple: what we need to see is the dynamism of the stories come out of this box—the pages are floating again in the universe for us to grab. I see it as a book that has wings. And working with everybody at Bard Graduate Center and U’mista has made that easy because they can feel the energy, I think, that’s coming out of those pages.

[AG]
Can you elaborate a little bit on the “box of treasures”—the gildas—and what that is, and what relationship it might have to your work?

[CH]
Well, when a family has a ceremony or a potlatch, they use their family’s box of treasures and bring their dances and their songs and their names from it. So, the imagery is really powerful because you have an idea that this is kept together—the wealth of the family is stored together in this box. And you don’t take from other people’s boxes, you have your own box. Every family that has a box of treasures understands what’s in it. Although with this book, our boxes can become enhanced, you know, maybe given more color, more detail.

[AG]
On this topic, one of the things we have been working with in the archive and that’s informing the exhibit and our labels, is the fact that after the book was published—years, decades after the book was published—George writes to Franz in 1920 and says (I’m paraphrasing), “By the way, the book with the many illustrations is filled with mistakes and we should correct them before we die.” We have the actual letter in the exhibit. And Boas writes back and says, “Great. Let’s do that. Take the copy of the book I gave you and start writing the corrections in the margins, and then send it back to me.” And we know Hunt did that because we have Hunt’s own copy of the book, with his notes in the margins, in the exhibit as well. And then, in the early 20s, Hunt writes up a manuscript in which he goes through the whole book, image by image, caption by caption, supplementing, correcting, adding information. For example, Hunt re-attributed a set of very interesting masks that were derived from carvings of lions on early 19th-century European ships; in his book, Boas called them Nulamal (Fool) masks, which influenced all later interpretations, but Hunt identified them as representing Sepa’xais (Shining Down Sun Beam), a celestial being associated with a particular set of villages around Quatsino Sound. And the most important things that he adds are the connections of objects to families: this mask belongs to this chief of this lineage who got it in marriage from this village, and so on. And it’s those notes in particular that allow us to reconnect these objects, and in some cases songs and stories and dances, to individual families today—to locate them as belonging in specific families’ treasure boxes. And it’s just enormously unusual and valuable to be able to recover that kind of genealogical information a century after objects were collected.

[CH]
Yeah, in a lot of the texts that were written during that time, people were almost anonymous. Artists’ names weren’t given. And you’re right that having that name or that “tag” that allows us—you or me—to find that space or that family, is really important. And I think it’s really exciting, because it shows the breadth of work that Boas and Hunt did to make it right. You know, for decades they worked on it. And there are mistakes that families have found, but it is gratifying to know that these mistakes, as far as Hunt was concerned, are getting corrected. It doesn’t make everything absolute, but it shows that there was a lot of work done afterwards. So the idea of the people in the book being anonymous is really… they are not.

[AG]
One of the things our team, working with community members, has tried to do is identify, by name, all of the people who were photographed in the book, especially the performers at the Chicago World’s Fair who have never been definitively identified by name – at least not in public. We found archival documents that named some of them, and we’ve been using photographs and newspaper accounts from the fair and census records to try to put names back together with faces. And we hope when the exhibit is in Alert Bay, people will come in and say “That’s my great-great-grandmother,” and we’ll add to those identifications. That’s been a big part of the collaborative spirit of the project, to say that if Boas couldn’t have written this book without Hunt, we can’t re-edit it without the family and the community. And I can’t exhibit it without participation of the family and the community. There are nested layers of collaboration through time and over space and…

[CH]
… and a continued collaboration when it reaches Alert Bay, when it reaches U’mista, because the community will then see what the work is and be able to comment.

[AG]
Yeah. So talk to me about how you see the potential differences between the look and feel of the installation, as well as the audience, at Bard Graduate Center and at U’mista.

[CH]
I think that in New York, the masks themselves are probably more pertinent or interesting to people as illustrations of the book, much like Boas would have meant for it to be. And also, I think, our “behind the scenes” gallery about the larger project will be a draw. So there’s a journey to be had, in the installation in New York, of exploring how the book was made, and the way the exhibit was made. And in Alert Bay, I feel like the audience is different—they’re community members mostly (although there will be travelers). And there will be a very specific relationship to the information. And I feel like the information is what people are looking for there. You know, it’s not so much a mask that they may see, but it’s going to be what comes from that, it will be more of a sense of… person… an intimate sense of where the knowledge has come from and where it will go. I think that’s the major difference between the two exhibits. Alert Bay is a small village, with many other villages around it, and when somebody comes to it, I’m sure they’re going to share that knowledge, and somebody else will share that so conversations will begin. And I’m excited to see that.

[AG]
You know, New York was Franz Boas’s (at least adopted) home town—he spent most of his adult life living here, working here, as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and as a professor at Columbia, establishing anthropology in North America out of this city. And for audiences here, Boas is the hook—he’s what’s familiar. The masks might be familiar from local museums, and from the history of museum exhibition and interest in Indigenous art, but New York audiences are going to need a kind of introduction, a “Kwakwaka’wakw culture 101,” to understand what they’re looking at in a way that the community in Alert Bay won’t. And New York audiences need to know that the culture is living in a way that’s taken for granted in Alert Bay. At the same time, for some people in Alert Bay, the photos of performers at the World’s Fair are ancestors, they’re not just century old…

[CH]
—images.

[AG]
Yeah. And to be able to hear the voices of their ancestors in the wax cylinder recordings of songs that were made at the Fair—you know, for people here that may be a historical curiosity, but at U’mista it’ll be that connection. And we’re thinking about ways in which the installation and layout of the show will reflect those varied audiences and different needs, from labeling to different modes of connecting with the materials—different ways of making the exhibition relevant in the present.

[CH]
I imagine in Alert Bay, people will make repeated trips to the exhibit. You know, they’ll take a look at it, feel it, and then come back. And every time they come, they may learn something else, and that’s not the New York experience. But I do love the Boas/Aaron/New York plus the Hunt/Corrine/U’mista—you know, putting those two energies together will create the groundwork for giving this box of treasures to the public.

[AG]
I agree! Any closing thoughts?

[CH]
I think that the kind of work that Hunt did, that Grandpa George did, has really become important. And knowing that when you see something that says “Boas” and not “Boas-Hunt,” knowing the amount of work that Hunt did—there’s some gratification in allowing his voice to come forward, to be side-by-side with Boas. And my participation and the voices of the older people is really gratifying. So I appreciate this connection and your project team’s visits to the village that have reignited the interest. Yeah, I think that’s important.

So, make it happen, Number One!