The voyage of building an outrigger canoe

The settling of the remote Hawaiian Islands over 1,000 years ago is one of the great feats of human adventure. Ancestors of today’s Hawaiians crossed thousands of miles of open ocean to find and settle tiny dots of land in the middle of a sea that covers a third of the planet. In double-hulled canoes, they navigated back and forth across long distances using sophisticated knowledge of the sea and the stars.

This story has captivated me since I arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1984 to attend graduate school. Only eight years earlier, the replica voyaging canoe Hōkūle‘a had been built and successfully sailed from Hawai‘i to Tahiti, some 3,000 miles to the south, using traditional navigation. The navigator was Pius Mau Piailug from the Micronesian island of Satawal, one of the few places where such knowledge still endures. This momentous event and its impact on the Hawaiian community have been wonderfully documented in Na‘alehu Anthony’s film Papa Mau. When I arrived in 1984, the excitement was still fresh. The Hōkūle‘a had taken on new challenges, and the revival of Pacific Island voyaging was underway.

Now, three decades later, I’m working on an exhibition that focuses on the canoe both as a central object of Hawaiian culture and as a metaphor for how to live on this finite Earth. As part of the research for that project, I've interviewed a handful of contemporary Hawaiian canoe builders and about a dozen people involved with the Hōkūle‘a and other voyaging canoes, including the late Herb Kane, a founder of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. To comprehend the enormous task of building a voyaging canoe, I've interviewed stone toolmakers, including adze makers, cordage and fiber experts, botanists, wood carvers, and others. It would take an entire village perhaps a year to build and outfit a large voyaging canoe back in the old days. Since there was no usable metal on most Pacific islands, it is often said that this was “Stone Age technology,” but that belies the incredible sophistication involved.

Well, talking to experts is one thing, but doing is another. In order to cement my expertise for this exhibition, and transform rote knowledge into actual experience, I’ve undertaken to build my own canoe. I’m a reasonably handy person but not a trained carpenter, so if I can do it, then anyone who can read directions and manage some tools can do it, too. I’d like to take you on my journey of building this canoe, and along the way, share with you some of the knowledge I’ve learned regarding traditional Hawaiian canoe building and all its related arts. 

The goal: To build an outrigger canoe using modern materials, but closely following the design of traditional Melanesian boats. Photo courtesy of James Wharram Designs. Used with permission.

There are many sets of plans available for building your own outrigger canoe. I chose the Melanesia design by James Wharram. This has got to be the easiest and least expensive place to start. The plans themselves cost £120 (a little more than $185); I got the sailing and paddling version. Now, I would much rather be making the Ulua, an 18-foot Hawaiian-style canoe designed by Gary Dierking, but that is both far more challenging and more expensive. Maybe for my next project . . . .

The Melanesia canoe will be 16 feet long—the same length as an ordinary American-style canoe. It weighs at most 110 pounds and is easy to lift. Almost the entire thing is made from two sheets of quarter-inch plywood. That’s right: I’m not cutting down a tree and carving it out. I’m also using other modern materials and modern tools, but as I go, I want to talk about traditional tools and techniques. The Melanesia uses what’s called the stitch-and-glue technique, which Wharram himself credits to Pacific Islanders.

So, come with me on this voyage, and let’s see if we can build a canoe.

Next: Harvesting a canoe log . . . or plywood.

—Douglas Herman, NMAI 

Doug Herman is senior geographer at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. A PhD graduate of the University of Hawaii Department of Geography, Doug created the indigenous-geography education project Pacific Worlds, working with communities in Hawai‘i and Micronesia to document their place-based cultural heritage. Since 2009 he has been doing research for the exhibition, Aloha ʻĀina: Hawai‘i, the Canoe and the World. That project explores how the values of the voyaging canoe translate into how to live on small, isolated islands, with lessons for how all of us may live sustainably on Island Earth. His small exhibition on the rise and fall of the Hawaiian Kingdom is scheduled to open at the museum in Washington, D.C., in 2015. 

Respecting Non-Western Sacred Objects: An A:shiwi Ahayu:da (Zuni war god), the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation, and the Museum of Modern Art

By Cécile R. Ganteaume, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

For the last few weeks, American Indians, the international art world, U.S. State Department officials, indigenous rights activists, and intellectual and cultural property rights lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic have been discussing the proposed sale of Hopi Katsina “friends” (often mistakenly called masks) at a Paris auction house. The Hopi, who live in northern Arizona, and their supporters tried to delay, if not halt, the sale. Hopi Katsina friends are among the most sacred Hopi ritual objects. Katsinam (the plural of Katsina) are spiritual beings that live in the peaks of the San Francisco Mountains and bring blessings to the Hopi. When worn during Kastina ceremonies, the friend—the spirit of Katsina—is united with the spirit of man. On April 12, 2013, a French judge ruled that “the claim that Hopi cultural patrimony is exclusively their property has no legal basis according to French law” and that the auction house could proceed with the sale..

The Hopi effort is the latest prominently reported instance of an American Indian tribe trying to regain its sacred objects from the international art world and market. American Indians have been seeking the return of their sacred objects since well before the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), the federal law that helps enable the return to tribes of certain categories of objects including sacred objects, held by U.S. museums.

Almost thirty years ago, on September 27, 1984, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City opened a highly anticipated and soon to be celebrated exhibition. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern was curated by William Rubin (1927–2006), then MoMA’s esteemed director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, in collaboration with Kirk Varnadoe (1946–2003), a professor within the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. On display in the exhibition was to be an A:shiwi (Zuni) Ahayu:da (war god) borrowed from the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, (now the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin). The MoMA exhibition, and its multi-authored, two-volume catalogue, explored the influence of tribal art and culture in modern art’s development “from Gauguin at the turn of the century to the Abstract Expressionists around 1950.” When the exhibition opened, the New York Times heralded it as “an immensely important show.” 

 

“People are talking about: The man from MoMA” by Barbara Rose in Vogue (August, 1984. Vol. 174(8), pages 357–361 & 416) with illustrations of the A:shiwi (Zuni) Ahayu:da (war god) in the collections of the Museum für Völkerkunde and the Paul Klee painting, Mask of Fear. Page 357 @ Condé Nast. Used with permission.

In one of their exhibition galleries, the curators planned to juxtapose the painted wood Ahayu:da “sculpture” with a Paul Klee oil painting, Mask of Fear (1932), to discuss what they found to be the striking affinity between the “primitive” and “modern” “works of art.” The Museum für Völkerkunde acquired the Ahayu:da in 1880, and Klee, the Swiss-born artist closely associated with the Bauhaus movement, was known to have visited the museum several times while the Ahayu:da was on display. Like many avant-garde artists of his time, Klee was keenly interested in the formal vocabulary of the visual arts of non-Western peoples; he wrote on the subject more than once. William Rubin was convinced that Klee was familiar with the Museum für Völkerkunde Ahayu:da and that it “consciously or unconsciously” influenced his Mask of Fear. In the catalogue essay, “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction,” Rubin wrote of the works’ “striking similarities,” comparing the oval-shaped heads; the single arrow projecting from the top of each head; the long, narrow noses and absence of mouths; and the horizontal line crossing each forehead. He suggested that “the curious multiple legs” protruding from Klee’s head were a transformation of the feathers projecting from the Ahayu:da’s chin. Klee’s painting was “a modernist transformation,” Rubin wrote, of the A:shiwi Ahayu:da “sculpture.” And this was how the curators intended to display the A:shiwi Ahayu:da from the Museum für Völkerkunde in “Primitivism” in the 20th Century: as a “primitive sculpture” with “conceptual complexity and aesthetic subtlety” whose exhibition and publication in the West, along with the appearance of other “primitive” works of art, had a great impact on Modernist aesthetic sensibilities. (See William Rubin, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, vol. 1. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984, pages 29–32.)

But as it happened, by 1984 the A:shiwi were already actively pursuing the return of their Ahayu:da—all wrongfully removed from shrines on their reservation. Cared for by A:shiwi religious leaders, Ahayu:da are powerful guardian beings who protect the A:shiwi and their land from harm. Their acquisition by European and European–America individuals and institutions broke all A:shiwi religious and cultural protocols. Their dispersion was the result of large-scale historical events that brought non-Western peoples, ideas, and practices to the Americas and led, in a myriad of ways and places, to the wrongful alienation of Native peoples’ religious patrimony.

The A:shiwi began their efforts to recover their Ahayu:da in 1978, twelve years before Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to provide a process for museums and federal agencies to return to Native Americans and Native Hawaiian organizations certain cultural items—human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony. The A:shiwi were in the vanguard of Native peoples seeking the return of sacred objects from museums, galleries, auction houses, and private collections. Buttressed by the newly legislated American Indian Freedom of Religion Act (1978), intended to protect American Indian religious liberties that had long been infringed upon and even prohibited, the A:shiwi campaign helped make it possible for other tribes to recover their own sacred objects. As T. J. Ferguson, an anthropologist who aided the A:shiwi in their efforts, has written, A:shiwi religious leaders were not only resolute in their pursuit, but most importantly were “morally persuasive” in their conversations with museum curators, administrators, and others in the art world elucidating the importance of returning Ahayu:da to A:shiwi shrines. (See T. J. Ferguson, “Repatriation of Ahayu:da: 20 Years Later.” Museum Anthropology, vol. 33, 2012, pages 194–95.)

During the summer of 1984, I was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation, the forerunner institution to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. As such, I was very much aware of the increasingly vocal opposition of Native peoples, including the A:shiwi, to having their sacred objects displayed as “art” in museum exhibitions—in fact, to having them housed in museum collections at all.

It is important to bear in mind that in Western art history, the term “sacred art” is used to refer to (what might be called in this specific context) ancillary objects used in religious ceremonies and buildings, such as Byzantine chalices and other Christian liturgical vessels; or medieval or renaissance paintings bearing religious iconography, such as Hieronymus Bosch’s extraordinary altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi; or, much more recently, certain abstract works with fields of luminous color, such as Henri Matisse’s stained glass windows in the Dominican Chapelle du Rosaire in France. In other words, in Western art history the term is used to refer to artistic creations depicting, expressing, or evoking religious subjects and a realm of reality beyond that ordinarily encountered in daily life. It is used to refer to artistic works intended to speak to the hearts, minds, and spirits of those contemplating the divine.

Importantly, it is not used to refer to, for example, a host consecrated by an ordained priest during the Eucharistic service of a Catholic Mass. A consecrated host has never been considered “art” by museums. Yet objects held by American Indians to be spiritually sentient were. And they were displayed in museums throughout the U.S. and Europe for reasons that had nothing to do with (read: without any understanding of) their deeply held spiritual reality, and without any awareness of, and consequently regard for, the religious practices and tenets of contemporary Native peoples.  

Museum of Modern Art members’ newsletter (no. 32, Jul–Aug, 1984) announcing the upcoming exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.
 

I learned that the Museum of Modern Art planned to include an A:shiwi Ahayu:da in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art through a preview in MoMA’s members’ newsletter. I shared this newsletter with the MAI–HF curators, and in particular with Brenda Shears (then Holland), who in turn shared it with our assistant director, George Eager. (Roland Force, director of the MAI–HF, was out of town.) After staff worked their networks to gather salient information, Eager wrote a letter to Richard Oldenburg, director of the Museum of Modern Art and a long-time colleague, advising him that A:shiwi Ahayu:da were “the most sensitive of Native American religious objects” and should not be put on display. He informed Oldenburg that museums throughout the country were in fact removing Ahayu:da from exhibition for this very reason. Eager went on to explain that any Ahayu:da out of A:shiwi  possession were considered stolen objects, illegally removed from shrines on the A:shiwi reservation. In no small measure because of this letter, MoMA removed the Ahayu:da borrowed from the Museum für Völkerkunde from “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art. (See James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern.” In Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art: A Documentary History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, pages 351–68.) 

I have never forgotten the pivotal role that the MAI–HF played in this incident, nor the experience of being a direct witness to a sea change in museum practice. MoMA’s decision represents one of the first times that an eminent institution at the center of one of the cultural capitals of the world removed a sacred American Indian object from display, let alone from such an important (and highly publicized) exhibition. It was, in fact, an historic act that helped focus worldwide attention on the inappropriate display of sacred American Indian objects and on the responsibility of museums to respect Native religious traditions. 

Cécile R. Ganteaume is the curator most recently of Circle of Dance, an exhibition on view at NMAI–New York. She is also the curator of the exhibition An Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian also on view at NMAI–New York, and the editor of the accompanying book. She is a recipient of a 2011 Smithsonian Secretary’s Excellence in Research Award. She joined the staff of the museum when it was established as part of the Smithsonian. Photo by R.A.Whiteside, NMAI. 

A Flag of The Fathers

British wool cloth flag said to have been given to Tecumseh (Shawnee, 1768-1813) by the British in 1812, National Museum of the American Indian, 23/730 (Photo by Roger A. Whiteside, NMAI)

 

Before it went on display at the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, Ontario last month, this British flag from our museum's collection had never been seen by the public before. Though it appears rather tattered, the flag is in remarkable shape considering its age: it turned almost exactly 200-years-old this year.

The flag is special not only for its venerable age and exceptional condition, but also because of its previous owner: the famous Shawnee warrior Tecumseh. As legend has it, Tecumseh received the flag from British Major General Sir Isaac Brock as a symbol of their alliance against the U.S. during the War of 1812. Tecumseh and his army of Native American warriors had joined forces with the British to halt American expansion into the “Old Northwest,”  a region now comprised of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin that Tecumseh had hoped would someday become an independent pan-Indian nation.

Brock’s gift was hardly an unusual one. At the time it was customary for British commanders to present flags, medals or uniforms to Indian chiefs as symbols of political allegiance. But Tecumseh’s military and leadership savvy so impressed Brock that he bestowed something else to Tecumseh along with the flag: the title of Brigadier General in Great Britain’s army.

Made of wool bunting and hand-stitched with linen thread, the flag –known as the Union Jack – is believed to have been carried by fellow Shawnee warrior Yellow Hawk (Othaawaapeelethee) during the Battle of the Thames in 1813, the same battle during which Tecumseh was killed. The flag was passed down through Yellow Hawk’s family as an heirloom until 1942, when it was purchased by Milford G. Chandler, an automotive engineer and enthusiastic collector of Native American arts and antiquities. In 1961, it became part of the museum’s collection.

Before delivery to the Woodland Cultural Centre, a First-Nations' managed museum, a team from the National Museum of the American Indian, led by textile and flag conservator Gwen Spicer, worked to conserve and mount the flag. Staff textile conservator Susan Heald and Mellon Felllows Sarah Owens and Rebecca Summerour also participated.

The flag is now on view as part of the Woodland Cultural Centre’s exhibition War Clubs & Wampum Belts: Haudenosaunee Experiences of the War of 1812, presenting the largely unknown story of the Iroquois civil war within the international war. The exhibit runs through Dec. 24, 2012.

Circle of Dance: Manikins Bring the Show Alive

Quechua Danza de Tijeras (Scissor Dance) outfit, 2010. Huancavelica, Peru. Cotton and synthetic fabric and trim, metallic fringe and thread, sequins, feathers, dye, plastic jewel. EP0954. Photo by Ernest Amoroso, NMAI

By Cécile R. Ganteaume

On October 6, 2012, a new exhibition opens at the National Museum of the American Indian–New York, to be on view for five years. Through the presentation of ten social and ceremonial dances selected from throughout the Americas, Circle of Dance presents Native dance as a vibrant, diverse, and above all meaningful form of cultural expression. Each of the ten dances is represented through the display of a single manikin dressed in full regalia and posed in a distinctive dance position. The manikins can be seen in the display cases built into the walls of the Diker Pavilion for Native Arts and Culture, a 6,000-square-foot exhibition and performance space designed specifically for dance.

The website accompanying the exhibition features essays by ten writers, each of whom has a deep, often personal, appreciation of the social, cultural, and ritual significance of the dance he or she illuminates. As the essays make clear, all of the dances share fundamental underlying meanings in which people’s close communion with their ancestors and with the natural and spiritual worlds figure prominently. Each of these dances embodies an awareness of a greater cosmic order, and often of the importance of reciprocal relationships in maintaining that order. In other words, life-sustaining concepts are embedded in these dances.

The dances featured range from a Yup´ik Quyana (Thank-You) Song Dance from western Alaska, in which male and female performers use feather or caribou-hair finger fans—said to represent the human spirit itself—to accentuate the fluid movements of their upper bodies and arms; to the Cubeo Óyne dance once performed in the Columbian and Brazilian Amazon by men wearing painted bark-cloth outfits representing animal spirit-beings who enter Cubeo villages to dance among and console grieving relatives; to the Quechua Danza de Tijeras (Scissor Dance), performed at festivals timed in accordance with the Andean Highland agricultural calendar and Catholic feast days, in which male dancers form teams with violinists and harpists to perform spectacular dances involving dynamic gymnastic movements requiring great dexterity and physical ability.

Correspondingly, dance outfits range from a Yup´ik parka made from several furs, including Arctic squirrel, land otter, wolf, and wolverine, and decorated with glass beads; to a knee-length Cubeo bark mask painted to represent forest spirits known as takahédekokü, seen only by Cubeo shamans; to a brightly colored Quechua Scissor Dancer’s baggy trousers and fitted jacket richly decorated with metallic embroidery, gold and silver fringe, and colored sequins and beads.

Absolutely essential to the presentation of each dance in the exhibition is the creation of ten custom-made manikins upon which the culturally rich dance outfits are displayed. From the outset of the exhibition planning, designers Gerry Breen and Susanna Stieff, NMAI–NY deputy director for exhibitions Peter Brill, and I knew full well that the impact of the manikins would be key to the success of the exhibition. Early on much time went into researching commercially available manikins that might be used. The manikins had to meet two essential criteria: They had to be flexible, so that they could be posed at dynamic moments that would capture the essence of the Native dance movement vocabularies in each of the ten dances and reveal how varied the dance styles are. Second and equally important, the manikins had to be made in several sections so that the dance clothing could be placed upon them without causing any stress to the garments. In addition, we hoped the manikins’ faces would achieve the look we were striving for.

NMAI mount-maker Shelly Uhlir was central to this thought process. A veteran and master mount-maker with over 20 years of museum experience, Shelly was the person with the greatest understanding of what would be required of manikins that were to be dressed in elaborate dance regalia—clothing, headdresses, and accessories—from the museum’s collections. In the midst of our evaluations, a visit to the fashion-design exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute excited the designers even more to the idea of displaying a broad range of Native dance clothing so often deeply integral to ritual performances—and to the potential of manikins to help create stunning visual impact.

At first some of the commercial manikins we considered for Circle of Dance appeared to be strong possibilities, because they could be posed dynamically. Over a period of weeks, if not months, however, commercial possibility after possibility was dismissed, for a wide variety of reasons. This period came to an end when Shelly, having demonstrated much patience with the rest of us, announced that if we wanted manikins that could express a range of dance movement vocabularies, could be dressed in clothing from the museum’s collections, and would have the faces we wanted, she would have to make them. Asked exactly how she would do this, she responded that she would figure it out, that she had some ideas and would start doing tests. 

Shelly Uhlir in her mount-making studio at NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center fitting a hand on a manikin she created for Lakota Northern Traditional Dance regalia. Photo by R.A.Whiteside, NMAI 

Prototypes began to appear. The designers were opposed to the manikins’ having a hard fiberglass finish. Shelly suggested making the head and face from a wire frame covered with cloth. The head was modeled with wire mesh to suggest not just a profile, but also the jawline and cheekbones. The technique gave us the sense of definition we wanted without being too detailed, but more experimenting with different materials was needed. Shelly next showed the exhibition team a fabric dog made for a previous exhibition. It had been coated with a gesso-like product to allow for the smooth application paint. We were impressed with the figure’s lifelike qualities. In addition to having a soft fabric finish, the designers knew that they wanted the Circle of Dance manikins to be painted a neutral grey in order not to distract from the clothing; they wanted the manikins to have a strong physical impact not to dominate the clothing, but simply to animate it. And the manikins needed to be able to take paint.

After consulting with some of her colleagues, Shelly proposed using a soft fabric that could molded around the manikin’s core and painted. The pliable fabric—essentially a synthetic felt that, after steaming, can be molded to hold a shape—offers great possibilities in Shelly’s hands. Shelly typically sculpts torsos and limbs for displaying clothing from polyethylene foam, but in earlier exhibitions the foam has always been fully covered. In Circle of Dance, we knew, parts of the dancers’/manikins’ bodies would be visible. And so, each manikin in the exhibition is custom-made by Shelly by first sculpting the torsos, hips, and upper and lower limbs from foam; joining those parts; and then covering exposed areas with fabric that she molds into human form and paints.

Shelly decided that the manikins' hands and feet required special treatment to make them look lifelike. She achieved this by casting the hands of a few conservators and collections staff (who graciously volunteered for the job) and her own feet, and molding the pliable fabric with those lifelike casts. The hands of the manikins are especially important, not only because the gestures of the arms and hands are essential to expressing the upper-body movement of the dances, but because several of the manikins hold things: a Tlingit Raven rattle, a pair of Yup´ik finger fans, a Mandan eagle dance fan, a Lakota beaded dance staff, a scarf, and juniper sprigs. The manikins’ hands have to look good and be functional. Again, Shelly has created a substructure that can securely hold a museum object, then covers the mount with fabric she has shaped over casts to create, for example, a hand lithely flourishing a caribou-hair fan.

Thanks to Shelly’s resourcefulness and technical and creative expertise, Circle of Dance will feature ten unique figures that show male and female dancers, adults and children, performing distinct Native dances. Some figures are posed in spiraling dance movements with shoulders, chests, and hips turning one way and the other. Other manikins have quiet middle bodies and subtly undulating arms. Some crouch. Some step nimbly, while others step with high-speed energy. All seem to move—forward, laterally, or with leaps up into the air. And all have expressive head and hand gestures.

All, I should say, except one. Due to missionary efforts in the 1940s, the Cubeo Óyne dance from the Amazon we are featuring is no longer performed. Because of this, and because of the particular construction and relative fragility of the painted-bark dance outfit, Shelly suggested that we deliberately use not a fully articulated, animated manikin for this figure, but a basic support mount.

Cubeo Óyne dance outfit, 1966. Amazonas State, São Gabriel da Cachoeira Municipality, Rio Uaupes, Brazil. Bark cloth, plant dye. 23/7047. Photo by Ernest Amoroso, NMAI

The Óyne dance mount is a haunting reminder that missionaries and government agents in countries throughout the Americas tried to suppress Native dancing, and actually outlawed it for years, in their efforts to impose assimilation. In striking contrast to this sad fact of history, however, the dynamic manikins Shelly has created for Circle of Dance to express an impressive range of dance styles and movement vocabularies truly help convey that unique forms of social, ceremonial, and ritual dancing maintain a vital place in contemporary Native life in many Native communities. 

Cécile R. Ganteaume is also the curator of the exhibition Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, on display at NMAI–NY, and the editor of the book of the same title. She is a recipient of a 2011 Secretary of the Smithsonian’s Excellence in Research Award for her work on Infinity of Nations. Photo by R.A.Whiteside, NMAI

Circle of Dance will be on view at NMAI–NY from October 6, 2012, through October 8, 2017.

Celebrating American Indian Athletes in the 1912 Olympics

Jim Thorpe Commemorative Wheaties Box, autographed by his daughter Grace Thorpe. 7 cm x 21 cm x 30.8 cm. National Museum of the American Indian, 26/4641. Photo by S. Voss

 

Even the most casual sports observer has heard of Jim Thorpe. The Sac and Fox athlete who swept the Pentathlon and Decathlon at the 1912 Olympics earned awards, accolades, and die-hard fans in nearly every major sport in the early 20th century: baseball, football, basketball, track and field. But he wasn’t the only Native American athlete who sealed his reputation at the Stockholm games. Thorpe was joined by three Indian brethren from the U.S. whose influence, even 100 years later, continues to reverberate throughout in Indian Country and beyond: Hopi runner Louis Tewanima, Native Hawaiian swimmer Duke Kahanamoku, and Penobscot runner Andrew Sockalexis.    

Long-distance runner and Olympic medalist Lewis Tewanima (Hopi, 1889?-1969) after winning a marathon in New York City, May 6, 1911. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Lewis Tewanima

Like Thorpe, Tewanima entered competitive sports by way of the Carlisle Indian School in rural Pennsylvania—2,000 miles from his birthplace on the remote Hopi mesas of Arizona. In 1907, he was ordered by federal authorities to attend the government-run school after a long dispute with the tribe over the education of its children. Tewanima arrived at the Carlisle’s doorstep “virtually a prisoner of war,” the school’s superintendent Moses Friedman later put it.

At 110 pounds, the twenty-something’s scrawny physique belied his natural athleticism. According to legend, Tewanima learned enough English to tell the school’s famed coach, Glenn “Pop” Warner, “Me run fast good.” After clocking his times, Warner needed no further convincing. Just a year later and with minimal training, Tewanima found himself competing at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London alongside fellow Carlisle Indian School teammate Frank Mt. Pleasant (Tuscarora). Competing against the world’s most rigorously trained runners, Tewanima placed 9th in the marathon with a time of 3:09:15. The performance of the virtually unknown athlete caught the eye of President Theodore Roosevelt, who reportedly remarked at a reception for the team, “This is one of the originals.”

When the 1912 Olympics rolled around, Tewanima returned with yet another Carlisle teammate, Jim Thorpe. Neither was required to compete in qualifying trials, such was the confidence in their abilities. Tewanima won the silver medal in the 10,000 meters with a time of 32:06.5—a U.S. record that stood for more than 50 years until Oglala Lakota runner Billy Mills broke it to win the gold medal during the 1964 Games.

Tewanima, Thorpe, and Warner enjoyed a hero’s welcome upon their return to rural Pennsylvania. Thousands of fans lined the streets to watch the now world-famous athletes parade through town, followed by a speech from the Carlisle superintendent that was as critical of Tewanima’s culture as it was complimentary of his athletic achievements: “His people, the Hopi Tribe of Arizona, had been giving the Government much trouble and were opposed to progress and education. It was finally decided to send twelve of the head men and most influential of the tribe to Carlisle to be educated in order to win them over to American ideas,” Friedman declared. “Louis Tewanima here is the twelfth of that party. He is one of the most popular students at the school. You all know of his athletic powers—I wanted you to know of his advancement in civilization and as a man.”

What Friedman didn’t realize (or perhaps preferred not to acknowledge) is that Tewanima’s athletic prowess was a direct result of his Hopi upbringing. Born in the late 1880s, Tewanima spent his childhood carrying on the ancient Hopi tradition of running as a spiritual act. For the tribe, long-distance running is a physical form of prayer believed to produce rain for their parched lands, good fortune for their people, and a connection to their ancestors. Hopi foot races were legendary for the endurance they demonstrated, not the least because most runners ran barefoot, despite the region’s rocky, cactus-strewn landscape.

Running was also a much-needed diversion on the lonely, windswept deserts of the Southwest. During his induction into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame in 1957, Tewanima recalled that as a child he would run nearly 50 miles with his friends just to glimpse passing trains in Winslow before embarking on the 50-mile journey home: “It was the summertime,” he explained with a shrug, “The days were long.”

But despite the insistence among Carlisle administrators that Tewanima had voluntarily exchanged his Hopi earrings, long hair, and traditional lifestyle for more “civilized” ways, he returned to Second Mesa, Arizona, soon after the 1912 Olympics. He remained there for the rest of his life, herding sheep and growing corn as his Hopi forefathers had before him. He died in 1969 after falling off a 70-foot cliff while walking home from a religious ceremony. At the time of his death, he was believed to be the oldest living U.S. Olympian.

Since 1974, hundreds of runners have gathered in Second Mesa for the annual Tewanima Foot Race to honor his memory. “Tewanima is a cultural hero to all Hopi,” Hopi High School track coach Rick Baker told Sports Illustrated in 1996, “But especially to young runners.”

Duke Kahanamoku (Native Hawaiian) prepares to dive, 1920 Olympics, Antwerp, Belgium. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Duke Kahanamoku

Known alternatively as the Bronze Duke of Waikiki, the Father of Surfing, and Hawai'i’s Ambassador of Aloha, Duke Paoa Kahanamoku remains the state’s greatest athlete. His list of achievements is a long one. Beginning with the 1912 Olympics, he participated in five Olympic games, earning three gold medals and two silver medals and setting three world records in the 100-year freestyle over the course of his career. In 1913, he earned the title of U.S. indoor champion; he became the outdoor titleholder in 1916 and repeated the achievement in 1920. He developed the now common “flutter kick” and popularized modern surfing, first appearing on the shores of Sydney, Australia, to teach eager would-be surfers how to carve their own longboards and later promoting the sport in southern California, Atlantic City, and on Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, where an avenue once bore his name.

Though Duke’s first name suggests a link to Hawai'i’s 19th-century kingdom, the Native Hawaiian actually inherited his name from his father, whose birth coincided with the Duke of Edinburgh's first visit to Hawai'i. Born in 1890 as the eldest of nine children, Duke learned how to swim “the old-fashioned way,” as he told the audience of the popular television show This Is Your Life in 1957: by being thrown from a canoe at the age of four by his father, who instructed him to “save yourself or drown.” Despite this intense introduction to the water, or perhaps because of it, Duke would spend the better part of his childhood in the surf at Waikiki Beach not far from his home.

In 1911 Duke swam in his very first meet, a competition sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and broke his very first record. Swimming 100 yards in 55.4 seconds, he beat the previous record not by fractions of a second, but an astonishing 4.6 seconds. The new time stunned AAU officials on the mainland, who refused to recognize the accomplishment, first claiming that officials in Hawai'i had misread their stopwatches and later that ocean currents had aided the swimmer. Local supporters eventually raised enough money to send him to Chicago, where he swam in a pool for the first time and dominated the 50- and 100-meter freestyle events. A year later, he made his victorious debut at the 1912 Olympics, winning the gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle and the silver medal in the 4x200-meter freestyle relay. King Gustav of Sweden crowned him with a laurel wreath that now sits in the Parker Ranch Museum in Hawai'i.

Though World War I forced the cancellation of the 1916 Games, Duke Kahanamoku continued to accept invitations to swimming exhibitions all over the country, competing in Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, Detroit, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and St. Louis in the span of one month that year, and bringing his 100-pound, 16-foot longboard with him whenever his travels took him near the ocean. Wind sliding, as surfing was once known among the Hawaiian royalty who practiced it, suddenly appeared on shores throughout the world.

During his last Olympic appearance, in 1924 in Paris, he was joined by his younger brother Samuel, who won the bronze medal in the 100-meter freestyle; Duke took silver. But his most impressive feat occurred in 1925, when he personally rescued eight passengers from a capsized boat off the coast of Corona del Mar using nothing but his strength and his longboard.

That such an unbelievable rescue might read like the plot of a Hollywood movie is appropriate considering that that’s where Duke headed next. Over the course of his 28-year film career, the telegenic athlete appeared alongside actors John Wayne, Jack Lemmon, Henry Fonda,  and others in roles that emphasized—and arguably mocked—his Native Hawaiian roots. During this time he also became Hawai'i’s unofficial ambassador, greeting VIPs like John F. Kennedy, Joe DiMaggio, Shirley Temple, and Amelia Earhart during their visits to the islands. The popularity and respect he enjoyed in Hawai'i eventually led him to the Honululu Police Department, where he spent 26 years as the city’s sheriff.

He died in 1968 at the age of 77. A ceremony was held on Waikiki Beach and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean while a local reverend offered these departing words: “God gave him to us as a gift from the sea, and now we give him back from whence he came.”

Andrew Sockalexis (Penobscot) with marathon trophies, 1912. Photo courtesy of the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries

Andrew Sockalexis

Andrew Sockalexis, like Lewis Tewanima,  took up running as an homage to his tribe’s ancestral customs. Born in 1892 on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Maine, Sockalexis grew up hearing stories about the tribe’s legendary “pure men,” an elevated status attained only by the community’s most agile youth. Before the tribe lost its hunting grounds to European settlers, these men acted as the Penobscot’s designated hunters, literally running down prey and abstaining from liquor, tobacco, and women to stay in top physical condition. The Sockalexis clan had produced a number of pure men in the past, and athleticism still ran in the family, so to speak. Andrew's father had earned a reputation as an outstanding runner in the tribe’s traditional five-hour foot races. His cousin, Louis Sockalexis, would become the first Native American baseball player to join the major leagues when the Cleveland Spiders drafted him in 1897. (Thanks to Louis’ success, in 1915 the team officially changed its name to the Cleveland Indians.)

Andrew Sockalexis was 10 years old when his father built a track near their home and encouraged his only son to use it. Just eleven years later, Andrew made national headlines by finishing 17th at the Boston Marathon in his first official race. The performance earned him a spot on the U.S. team for the 1912 Olympics, but 90-degree heat on the day of the race took its toll. Though he was considered a favorite among the marathon’s 12 American runners, Sockalexis placed 4th. He later explained that his strategy of holding back to conserve energy had backfired. He had waited too long to gain on the marathon’s frontrunners and couldn’t catch up in time. 

In the end, Sockalexis’ promising career would be cut short. In 1919, seven years after his Olympics debut, he succumbed to tuberculosis. He was just 27 years old. On the 90th anniversary of his death, the Maine State Legislature officially recognized him among the ranks of the state’s greatest runners of all time, declaring that he “brought much pride to the Penobscot Nation and to all the people of Maine.”

— Molly Stephey, Public Affairs Producer, Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian

These photos are part of the museum's exhibition, "Best in the World: Native Athletes in the Olympics," on view in Washington, D.C., through September 3, 2012.