What makes an object ‘authentically’ Indigenous? And how can objects challenge our ideas about the history of encounters between Europeans and Indigenous peoples? In this blog article, recent graduate in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology Olly DeHerrera revisits her research into one of the Museum’s display cases, focussing on the provenance of a painted ceramic flask:
If you walk the stone steps down to the forecourt of the Pitt Rivers Museum, you will find yourself facing Case 153, containing “Pottery - North America”. On the left side of the case, you’ll find this small ceramic water flask, described in the museum’s record as a ‘flat circular pottery flask painted with katsina design’.
 |
| Figure 1. 'Flat circular pottery flask painted with katsina design'. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (1913.87.54) |
The flask is recorded as having been made and decorated by a woman named Paelae, with assistance from her daughters, who were members of the Tewa-Hano clan of the Hopi Pueblo Tribe. The Hopi Tribe’s villages are some of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the Americas, situated atop three Mesas (flat-top elevations), six thousand feet above the northern Arizona desert. Today, approximately seven thousand Hopi inhabit the twelve villages of the Hopi Nation. These striking elevated villages and the rich culture of the Hopis were of particular interest to anthropologists of the time. The Hopi are understood to have inspired Alfred Huxley’s depictions of the Native Americans of the ‘Savage Reservation’ in his famous novel A Brave New World.
The flask was collected by Oxford anthropologist Barbara Whitchurch Freire-Marreco. Although her legacy as an anthropologist is modest, Freire-Marreco is remembered as a remarkable, pioneering female anthropologist within Oxford’s Department for Museum Anthropology. As a Research Fellow at Somerville College, she undertook fieldwork in New Mexico and Arizona from 1911-1912, and again in 1913-1914, studying 'the Nature of the Authority of Chiefs and Kings in uncivilised society’.
Her field notes indicate she spent a significant amount of time with Paelae and her family, purchasing multiple ceramic pieces from them, including this decorative ladle.
 |
| Figure 2. A decorative ladle also made by Paelae and her daughters. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (1913.87.26) |
The Hopi Pueblo are one of the many Indigenous groups inhabiting the arid, mountainous, and rugged terrain of the Southwest (the contemporary States of Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Western Colorado). Despite being labelled ‘Pottery - North America’, Case 153 contains almost exclusively Pueblo pottery. The Pueblo's centuries-old tradition of producing iconic pottery with geometric designs has found huge popularity with archaeologists, anthropologists, art collectors, and tourists alike. If you have ever visited the American Southwest, there’s a good chance you may have seen some modern Pueblo pottery for sale in National Parks and ‘Trading Post’ gift shops.
The flask is decorated with the symbol of a Kachina/Katsina, a broad term which describes a series of spiritual figures, or ‘icons’, associated with various natural and supernatural forces in Pueblo cosmology. The Katsina holds feathers in both hands and wears a headdress, a crude depiction of Hopi dancers.
 |
| Figure 3. 'Hopi dancers photographed by Freire-Marreco during her fieldwork'. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (1998.95.7) |
Although the Katsina represent a legitimate feature of Pueblo culture, the inclusion of such designs on pottery only began appearing around the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, many of the more decorative and pictographic objects in Case 153 are from this later period in the pottery tradition’s long history. A majority of the older pottery in the case is simple in form and would have had a utilitarian function in a Pueblo household, compared to the more decorative later objects, which vary greatly in form.
So, why had the Pueblo begun adapting their pottery style so dramatically by the start of the twentieth century?
By the time of Freire-Marreco’s arrival in Arizona, the market for Pueblo art was changing rapidly. For the last 150 years prior, Pueblo art had mainly been leaving the Mesas via professional ethnographers - most often associated with institutions like the Bureau of American Ethnology. The three large water vases on the top shelf of Case 153 were collected from the Pueblo by ethnographer James Stevenson in the late 1800s. They were later distributed to the Pitt Rivers Museum by the Smithsonian Institution in 1896.
 |
| Figure 4. One of the three large water jugs displayed in Case 153. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (1896.54.75) |
However, the increase of permanent settlements and the construction of the Santa Fe Railway Line in the twentieth century brought the opportunity for the Pueblo to sell directly to a larger tourist market. The Fred Harvey railway company, which owned the Santa Fe Railway, brought tourists directly into contact with local Indigenous people through the Fred Harvey ‘Indian Tours’. During these tours, Pueblo people were paid to open access to their villages and perform traditional (or at least traditional-looking) ceremonies. Tourists could also purchase directly from Pueblo artists in Fred Harvey’s ‘Indian Shops’. It was during such tours that the American public became familiar with Hopi dances, which was depicted extensively on posters and in handbooks.
 |
| Figure 5. ‘Indian Detours’ travel brochure produced by the Fred Harvey Railway Company in 1890. |
The popularity of these tours was driven by romantic colonial ideas about ‘untouched’ humanity living beyond the frontier of American colonial reach. Such ideas about Indigenous societies tend to deny them the same nuanced and complex political histories that we characterise the European past by. It is exactly these romanticised ideas that Huxley invokes in literary form, intentionally contrasting his fictional Native American Society with the hyper-developed and dystopian world of the “World State”.
Objects like the katsina flask represent a form of Pueblo art that arose to appeal to the specific interests of tourists, ethnographers, and other visitors to the American Southwest. Indeed, if Palae intended to create an object appealing to outside observers of Pueblo culture, she was certainly successful. The eye-catching flask has featured in multiple showcasing projects within the Pitt Rivers Museum, including the museum's audio tour that ran throughout the 2010s.
The Katsina flask is actually one of two near-identical flasks purchased from Paelae by Freire-Marreco. If you stand on your tiptoes, you can see the other flask on the middle shelf of the ‘Pottery – Design and Decoration’ case, to the right of the museum’s forecourt. This demonstrates that the Katsina flask was actually one of many produced with this design by Paelae and her family.
A strikingly similar canteen is displayed alongside the Katsina flask, giving the mistaken impression that they are part of a set. In fact, the larger Katsina flask was collected in Arizona by the former Oxford professor, Richard Baxter Townshend, in 1903. Could this have also been made by Paelae and her family? Or could this be evidence that the Pueblo people shared designs in the emergence of a small-scale production?
 |
| Figure 6. The Katsina Flask collected by Richard Baxter Townshend. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (1931.60.13) |
These transformations to Pueblo pottery arts were not embraced as keenly by ethnographers as they were by pottery makers. Many anthropologists felt at the time that commercial factors influencing Native American art styles across North America made these objects ‘less Indigenous’, or ‘fake’. In 1889, one American anthropologist angrily wrote, ‘the country is flooded with cheap, and scientifically speaking, worthless earthenware made by the Pueblo Indians to supply the tourist trade' (Holmes, 1889: 320).
So, how should we view our Katsina flask? Is it an example of a ‘worthless fake’, or might we understand it differently in the light of new anthropological approaches?
Despite the problematic colonial undertones of arrangements like the ‘Indian Tours’, the independence that this market afforded the Pueblo was transformative. By achieving greater economic independence, the Hopi were better able to protect their culture, beliefs, and choices about how they wanted to organise themselves as a society in the United States. The choices of Hopi people during this era laid a strong foundation for the Tribe that continues to this day. In fact, many Pueblo people today continue to identify examples of their parents' and grandparents' work stored in museums and express a deep fondness and pride for pottery from this era.
The unconventional anthropological approach that Freire-Marreco took in her fieldwork allows us to access these sorts of perspectives on colonial history. Her choice to collect objects that her informants were currently making helps us learn more about how the Pueblo made choices to navigate the immense upheaval that colonialism brought to their way of life. These histories provide a counter-narrative to the dominant view of Indigenous people as subjects defined by their lack of intermingling with European ideas and instead highlight their agency and awareness of outside interest in aspects of their culture.
Freire-Marreco’s interactions with her Pueblo informants provide many such insights that the museum is only just beginning to explore. Her ability to see shared humanity and build friendships with Pueblo women led her to declare in a letter to Somerville that the Pueblo were more her research collaborators than ‘uncivilised’ subjects of study. Despite being unable to receive a degree at the time due to her gender, her progressive outlook was far more aligned with the basis of anthropological methodology today.
The Katsina flask offers us a story of how Indigenous people harnessed ethnographic and popular interest in their material culture. By challenging our conceptions about what makes ‘Indigenous art’, we can also challenge popular social narratives about colonial history. It is my hope that anthropologists continue to embrace these stories and seek them out within the museum archives.
By Olly DeHerrera, Graduate in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology
Bibliography and further reading:
Dilworth, L. (1996) Imagining Indians in the Southwest : persistent visions of a primitive past. Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian Institution Press.
Fowler, D. D. (2000) A laboratory for anthropology : science and romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846-1930. 1st ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Holmes, W H. 1889. 'Debasement of Pueblo Art '. American anthropologist 2(4): 320
Kinsel, R. & E, Poon (2022) Grounded in clay : the spirit of Pueblo pottery. London ; Merrell Publishers.
