Taught as part of Oxford University's Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology (VMMA) programme, the 'Provenance Research and the Ethnographic Archive' course provides students with an opportunity to conduct original research on an object, photograph, sound recording or film from the Pitt Rivers Museum's collections. In addition to a full research report, students are invited to write a blog post on their discoveries.
Here Beatrix Stark (VMMA 2023-2024) writes about her choice, a disc rattle (accession number: 2017.103.48) from the collection of Raymond Wilkes, an English ‘hobbyist’ with a fascination for Native American culture.
It is unlikely that visitors to the Pitt Rivers Museum will have encountered this rattle before. Since its accession into the museum the rattle has been stored in offsite storage along with objects from the wider Wilkes collection. At first glance the eye is drawn to the bold motifs of two tipis and a buffalo which are painted on the head of the rattle. Even to the untrained eye these motifs, enshrined within popular culture, are associable with Native American culture.
Figure 1. Reproduction handheld rattle, made in a Native American style, decorated with motifs including a buffalo, a thunderbird and two tipis.
Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2017.103.48)
2017.103.48 is described on the Pitt Rivers Museum database as a ‘reproduction handheld rattle, made in a Native American style, decorated with motifs including a buffalo, a thunderbird and two tipis’. The frame of the rattle is constructed from a thin piece of wood, measuring 690mm in length and 104mm in width at the rattle's head. The circular head of the rattle has been covered in leather which has been stitched together prior to being painted green around the edges. The faces of the rattle display two different painted motifs: when facing right the rattle head depicts two yellow tipis, a black buffalo and red circular symbol with four spikes radiating from it; the alternate side has a painted red zigzagging border which frames a black thunderbird upon a yellow background. The handle of the rattle is covered in pink felt over which a piece of brown ribbon has been wound. A single feather is attached to the butt of the handle. The rattle makes a noise when shaken as the head contains an ‘indeterminate number’ of loose pellets.
Figure 2. Detail of rattle face depicting two tipis, a buffalo, red circular symbol with spikes radiating from the corners and a thunderbird; alternate rattle face, displaying red zigzag pattern, green edge, and central black thunderbird upon a yellow background.
Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2017.103.48)
The rattle belongs to the Raymond Wilkes collection, a collection of Native American hobbyist material which was donated to the PRM in 2017. The museum accepted the donation as a complement to the Newton Turvey collection, a hobbyist collection acquired by the PRM in 1998. It is uncertain whether Wilkes made or collected the rattle and if the geographical location of its production was North America, Canada or the United Kingdom. The rattle is not comparable in style or form to any of the rattles currently held within the PRM collections.
Raymond Wilkes was a twentieth-century English Native American hobbyist living in the West Midlands. The term ‘hobbyist’ is used to describe often white, non-indigenous people who have a fascination with Native American culture. Hobbyists are actively involved in researching Native American history, reproducing aspects of its material culture and staging historical re-enactments. During the mid-twentieth century Wilkes was one of ‘less than a dozen people in Britain to not only participate in reproduction and re-enactment but to make a serious study of the North American Indian’ (“Ten days with the Sioux Tribe”).
Native American hobbyism emerged from the long history of cultural ‘criss-crossing’ that has taken place since the European ‘discovery’ of the New World (Deloria 1998:129). During the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, American patriots disguised themselves as ‘Mohawk Indians’, drawing an affinity between American and Indigenous identity, as a means of asserting the legitimacy of settler colonial land rights. During the nineteenth century the mass transfer of Native American peoples onto reservations gave rise to popular entertainment in the form of ethnic shows. Native Americans such as Sitting Bull were paid to leave reservations to perform the role of ‘Indian’ in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, a series of dramatized re-enactments of American history, that toured Europe between 1887-1892 and 1902-1906. Elements of Native American culture were further assimilated within popular culture through the social movement of the Boy Scouts. By the twentieth century ‘Cowboy and Indian’ movies, evolving from the nineteenth-century Wild West Show, had seeped into European popular culture, enshrining a romanticised image of the vanished ‘Native American’ within the collective imagination.
A key characteristic which defines hobbyism is the movement's commitment to ‘authenticity’. Within the context of hobbyism, ‘authenticity’ is defined as ‘attention to material detail and the use of “traditional” materials and techniques’ (Peers 2025). Therefore, despite the decontextualising process inherent in hobbyism, in which material culture from different indigenous groups and periods are assembled, objects made by non-indigenous people using traditional techniques and materials, are considered by hobbyists to be equal in authenticity to those made by indigenous peoples.
 |
Figure 3. 'From The Days of the Wild West', Raymond Wilkes displaying items from his Native American and hobbyist collection. 2017.103 Supplementary Information, Manuscripts and Collections Department, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
Confronted with limited archival information regarding the rattle, a core method of provenance work is to expand research beyond the immediate institution. The widespread digitisation of museum collections allowed me to expand my search to the online collections of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), located within the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.
A simple search for the term ‘rattle’ on the NMAI database returned a range of rattles which displayed a similar form and motifs. The available provenance information states that many of the rattles were made circa late nineteenth and early twentieth century, accessioned or collected in the early to mid-twentieth century and geographically from North America, Canada. I contacted a curator at the NMAI who told me that these items are termed “disc rattles” or “flat disc rattles” and were made by several First Nations groups in Canada and some tribal groups on the US Northern Plains. Rattles may have been used for ritual or musical purposes, important not only for ‘extra-musical affects’ but because ‘their presence contributes to the symbolic meanings associated with the materials from which they were made, as well as the purpose of the song’ (“The Challenges of Collecting North America”). The curator suggested that Native American people may have made and sold undecorated rattles, to non-indigenous people such as hobbyists or boy scouts who subsequently painted them.
Flat disc rattles, widespread from ‘the Eastern Anishnabe area through central and on to the north-western regions of Canada’ are made from a flat stick looped back on itself and covered in rawhide (“Rattle Construction”). Plains disc rattles predominantly use hide from the ‘buffalo pericardium’ whereas the Tlicho (Dogribs) are more likely to use ‘caribou skin parchment’ (“Rattle Construction”). The motif of the buffalo on the PRM rattle could therefore be indicative of the rattle being inspired by Plains disc rattles. Rattles within the Metropolitan Museum of Art also display the motif of the tipi, however I am yet to find rattles which also display the motifs of a buffalo and thunderbird. More elaborate in design, the PRM rattle appears to be a copy of earlier rattles which were indigenous made.
Although it is not possible from this brief comparison to define the provenance of the rattle it provides a glimpse into the production of ‘sacred’ objects for the European market. The PRM rattle was potentially inspired by a rattle that had undergone multiple layers of cultural mediation – having been decorated with the intention of being sold to the European market or subsequently decorated post purchase. Increasing the quantity of comparisons may provide insights into why the motifs of the tipi, thunderbird and buffalo were chosen beyond their totemic significance within Native American culture.
By the 1880s the movement of Native American peoples onto reservations signalled the completion of the settler colonial land grab. Native American ‘depopulation’ peaked in 1910 with the population falling to ‘circa 200,000’ – in an epoch defined by the supplanting of the American identity over indigenous identities (Green 1988: 37). However, the notion that Native Americans were wiped out by settler colonialism has been used to perpetuate the myth of the ‘vanished’ Native American. Green states that during the early twentieth century ‘for one brief moment in space and time, it appear[ed] to most Americans that, indeed, this species [Native Americans] will go the way of the buffalo, leaving the stage clear for an unobstructed stage for playing Indian’ (Green 1988: 37). This lends a new poignancy to the rattle’s motifs which, in their stereotypical form, presence an imagined absence.
The ambiguity of what defines an object as ‘authentic’ is exemplified by the hobbyist collections within the PRM. For example, should objects from the Newton Turvey collection which were begun by indigenous people before being finished by Turvey (a hobbyist) be considered more authentic than objects entirely produced by hobbyists? If the authenticity of an object is linked to the indigeneity of their maker does this also hold true for objects that were made by Indigenous people for the European market but not used for ritual purposes?
The myth of the vanishing Native American, and the stereotypical imagery associated with Native American culture, prevents the identities and voices of First Nations and diasporic Native American communities from being seen and heard.
The rattle could be used as an entry point for thinking through notions of cultural identity by engaging with the Native American diaspora in the UK. The rattle, as a hybrid object, presences the imaginary space between worlds, unsettling any straightforward understanding of the term ‘authentic.’
By Beatrix Stark, Graduate in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology
References Cited
Deloria, P. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven : Yale University Press.
Green, R.1988. ‘The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe’, Folklore, 99 (1), pp. 30–55.
“Rattle Construction” excerpt from ‘The Culture of the Drum’, Native Drum <shttps://iportal.usask.ca/sites/iportal.usask.ca/files/content/add/1H%20-%20Rattle%20Construction%20-%20Some%20Examples.pdf>[accessed 2 April 2025].
L Peers 2025, pers. comms.
“The Challenges of Collecting North America, Continued: The Sioux and the Smithsonian - the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Metmuseum.org, 14 Oct. 2014, www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/collecting-north-america-2. Accessed 30 Mar. 2025.
‘Ten days with the Sioux Tribe’, MERCIAN, 2017.103 Supplementary Information, Manuscripts and Collections Department, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
