End Date: Monday, December 31, 2018
Unidentified Diné Man and Manuelito,
New Mexico Territory, ca. 1867
By Nicholas Brown & Son
Diné, meaning “The People,” is how the Navajo refer to themselves. The Diné comprise the largest Indigenous nation in North America. Diné Bikéyah, also known as The Navajo Nation, stretches across portions of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico; at more than 27,000 square miles, it is larger than 10 of the U.S. States.
In 1598 the founding of the Spanish colony of New Mexico changed the lives of the Diné forever, marking the beginning of the often-violent changes brought by settler colonialism. In 1848 the U.S. Army arrived in New Mexico territory, and in 1864 the U.S. government forcibly removed the Diné from their homeland to an impoverished tract of land known as the Bosque Redondo, in eastern New Mexico. This exhibition observes the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Navajo Peace Treaty, which took place on June 1, 1868, after the Diné insisted on being allowed to return home. The Diné are the only Native Nation to successfully use a treaty to retain their homeland.
End Date: Saturday, November 10, 2018
An X-ray of an shotgun wound to the upper arm. Image: Case courtesy of Dr. David Cuete, Radiopaedia.org, rID24457
Mass shootings involving guns have become a fact of American culture. While mass murders happened throughout recorded history, changing civilian gun technology has made the murders more deadly.
However, most gun deaths are not mass shootings. For example, in 2015 gun suicides killed 22,000 Americans, homicides killed 13,000 people, and mass shootings killed 46.
Museums have played a role in the romanticizing of guns, which began with the earliest display of guns in European “Cabinets of Curiosity.” For example, the 17th century Ashmolean collection in Oxford contained numerous firearms, including a musket of the Elizabethan period inlaid with mother-of-pearl and engraved with the heads of Roman emperors. The British Leverian collection in Westminster had early 18th century Turkish guns, and Napoleon III had a Prussian needle gun in his Cabinet of Curiosities. In the late 1800s, Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, founder of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, assembled a large collection meant to trace the evolution of firearms. In the 19th century as museums collected the spoils of colonization, the collection and display of guns and others weapons increased. Military museums, built around armaments amassed for citizen militias and the national military, began housing and displaying enormous collections of guns.
American museums, particularly those that portrayed Western expansion, created exhibitions that glamorized firearms, with persistent themes including the “Kentucky” or “Pennsylvania” Rifle (long rifles), Colt revolvers, and armed outlaws who carried these firearms. Such exhibitions celebrated a gun-slinging American frontier, based in part on historical events, in part on popular legends, and, in part on outright fiction. Museums have not been the only ones romanticizing guns, but their role in this process is undeniable.
Dave Phillips and Devorah Romanek, 2018