Collection With a Conscience

Kakuta Hamisi knows the ivory container and the slim wooden earrings in the Seattle Art Museum’s African collection came from his Kenyan homeland. But their history ends there.

“I wish I could go back and find who those belong to: I’d give everything back,” said Hamisi, who has spent the last two years helping the museum catalog some 2,000 Maasai objects--among them wigs, necklaces and household items--from southern Kenya and northern Tanzania.

The goal is to tell the stories behind the collection in the exhibition called A Maasai Community Adorns a Bride, which opened in June and runs through next year.

The collection was left to the museum by American Katherine White, who made regular trips to Africa until her death in 1980. Collecting was White’s passion, but language barriers stymied her interaction with the Maasai who sold her the items, so little is known about their history and their place in the lives of the nomadic Maasai people.

The problem is one faced by many museums with collections of cultural artifacts, particularly those donated by collectors who knew little about the items.

“We don’t want to misrepresent the country involved or the people involved,” said Ben Bronson, curator of Asian archeology and ethnology at the Field Museum in Chicago. “But every museum in the world faces this problem.”

Bronson said the Field Museum constantly assesses its collections for cultural accuracy. It learned that thousands of items given to the museum in 1956 by an English collector were probably from Indonesia rather than Burma as they initially were presented.

Peter Lape, curator of archeology at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum in Seattle, said it is a recurring problem because the rules surrounding collection practices have changed little. Private collectors still donate objects without providing information about their provenance.

“The object itself is almost worthless without that information,” Lape said. “It doesn’t tell a story at all.”

Hamisi, a Maasai who left his homeland in 1995 to attend Evergreen State College in Olympia, said his experience at the Seattle Art Museum helped him realize that parts of Maasai culture were in danger of being lost.

A blue necklace on display is devoid of the bright red, yellow and orange beads that are often used to distinguish one Maasai community from another. The necklace should not be included in the exhibition, Hamisi said, because it was “probably made by an entrepreneur.”

The braided wigs displayed on a mannequin next to the necklace don’t represent the Maasai culture, Hamisi said.

White did most of her collecting in the 1970s when it was acceptable to purchase an item directly from its owner. In her journals, she writes about asking a Maasai man if she could purchase his lip plug. He expresses some reservations but she persists and he eventually rips the plug from his flesh, which had grown around it.

White’s son, Ben Merkel, said she was very interested in getting the stories behind the objects.

“[But] it was tough, especially being a white woman, to show up in these villages by herself, with only a translator. That was kind of not done too often back in the ‘50s,” Merkel said. “When she could get the story behind an object, she was very interested in it.”

Villagers were eager to offer White artifacts in exchange for money or a trade, Merkel said.

“She showed up in one village, and suddenly the word was out that a crazy white woman was paying good money for tools,” he said. “They would come out with all kinds of things.”

Hamisi, who is roughly 26--the Maasai don’t record or celebrate birthdays--persuaded the museum to fund a project that would allow him to travel to his village of Merrueshi to gather more appropriate art for the exhibition.

He interviewed, photographed and videotaped people describing their contributions: a shield made of buffalo hide, a beaded belt made by a mother for her daughter, and a game, called mancala, which the elders play.

All will be part of the museum’s larger exhibition, Art from Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back, which begins Feb. 7 and runs until May 19.

In exchange for the collection, the museum funded a $10,000 project that allowed the village of Merrueshi to build a school and a water-purification system.

Curator Pam McClusky said it is the museum’s way of taking a more conscientious approach to collecting. It develops community ties through people such as Hamisi, who can bring personal meaning to the exhibitions.

Hamisi helped the museum acknowledge that “the consequences of collecting were not highly scrutinized,” which can remove an entire legacy of culture, she said.