As Native people, many of us have walked through a museum staring at important cultural items from our own tribes as they are displayed inside glass boxes. Many of us do not have access to our own family heirlooms because our ancestors were forced to sell them in order to survive, and sometimes, those items end up in museums for the general public to learn from. Although those museums are prioritizing education, they are forgetting about the real people who these items came from and belong to. Dr. Meranda Roberts (Numu / Xicana) works to heal relationships between museums and Native people as well as to curate Native American collections in a conscious way. Recently, Dr. Roberts began working with a collection of Cahuilla basketry at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. The two of us met at Idyllwild Arts Academy during Native American Arts week, but have had connections through mutual colleagues and the UC Riverside community for years. Dr. Roberts agreed to sit down with me and discuss her work thus far as well as the plan for the Benton’s collection of precious Cahuilla basketry.
Who are you? What do you do?
My name is Dr. Meranda Roberts and I’m a citizen of the Yerington Paiute tribe as well as Xicana. I graduated from the University of California Riverside in 2018 with a doctorate in History with an emphasis on Native Studies. My Doctorate focused on four different basket weavers, one from the Great Basin, one from Northern California, and two Cahuilla weavers. I wrote about how they maintained their basket weaving tradition despite the things that have happened to their communities. I worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for four years revamping their seventy year old Native American hall. Now, I am currently working at Benton Museum of Art (Pomona College) as a consultant for their Native American collection. I am also the curator for a new exhibit called “Continuity: Cahuilla Basket Weavers and their Legacies.” My involvement with the Benton started in 2020 when their director, Victoria Sancho Lobis, contacted me to work with their basket collection and to help the museum reach out to different Native communities whose items are housed at the museum.
What event recently took place at the Benton Art Museum and what was its significance?
On July 16th, the Benton Art Museum hosted an event for Native basket weavers in the region. The call for those basket weavers went out to the various Cahuilla bands through community members Lorene Sisquoc and Rose Ann Hamilton, with the intention of inviting weavers to interact with the collection of Cahuilla basketry that the Betnon has from the 1900s. What makes this particular collection so unique is that the collector, Emil Steffa, actually documented the names of the basket weavers he bought from and in some cases took their photographs; at the time anthropologists were not doing this sort of due diligence as much as they should have. Steffa was a graduate of Pomona College who fell in love with Cahuilla basketry while conducting research in the Coachella Valley and when he died, his collection went to the Benton.
The event on July 16th was something I felt was needed for the museum to do because it is their institutional responsibility to ensure that baskets could be reunited with their living descendants. When I was approached to curate an exhibition that featured these baskets I knew I could not do so without involving the community and explaining my processes. I understand my role as a curator to be sort of like a facilitator, where I help the institution understand the needs of Native communities. So, the event was really about the museum putting out word that they have these baskets and that they’re accessible. It was also a first step in building relationships with the descendants so that we can work in tandem in honoring ancestors and in creating a story that exemplifies how Cahuilla People have always been here and always will be.
The event included Cahuilla Bird Singers, a basket weaving workshop, and we took people into the collection space to touch and hold the baskets. . I felt an enormous amount of gratitude at the end of the day when we invited Bird Singers into the collection to sing to the baskets. It was a really moving event for me, but also important for the museum staff to experience because I wanted them to recognize that these items remain deeply connected to their community in ways that not everyone always understands. Baskets are the embodiment of ancestral love and I think that event helped the staff who were present fully appreciate that concept and reality.
I’ve worked with Lorene and Rose Ann a lot, and there’s actually a chapter in my dissertation about Lorene’s work and life; which I helped curate into an exhibition that is currently on display at the Field Museum. So, when I got asked to do this work at the Benton, I knew I had to include both of these women, and I knew that they could provide the best guidance on how to best represent these communities. All three of us decided that it was our responsibility to reunite the baskets with their families. For me, having had previous experiences, that kind of reunification within a museum space is extremely important. I think oftentimes the people who run museums see these cultural items as dormant. But they’re part of the community. And for everyone to share their cultural and ancestral experiences with the baskets makes them realize that these items have homes.