Sacred Circles: Native American Art and American Culture

Sacred Circles: Two Thousand Years of North American Indian Art was a large museum exhibit illustrating the artistic achievement of American Indian people north of Mexico. It was mounted twice, once in Great Britain as the major component of the commemoration of the United States Bicentennial, and once (from April 4 through June 19, 1977) at the Nelson Gallery of Art-Atkins Museum of Fine Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, the museum of which Ralph T. Coe, the organizer of the exhibit, is director. Sacred Circles was designed to teach us about the beauty of Native American art work. The present essay is intended to discuss the show itself as an artifact. I mean to suggest that those in American Studies can make good use of such events because they reveal aspects of our values, our perceptions of reality, and the structure of our society; this show also reveals the remarkable persistence in the face of facts of certain long-lived misconceptions about American tribal peoples. We begin, then, by asking what can be learned from Sacred Circles about the way that North American Indian people are currently perceived. Several of the basic assumptions and misunderstandings about Native American peoples were present before the first permanent European settlements in what are now the United States and Canada. The sixteenthcentury writings of Richard Hakluyt and George Peckham make this clear. The land, these Englishmen assumed, rightly belongs to the first modern Christian nation to stake a plausible claim to it. All "savages" behave in the same way. Leading them from their dark ways will not only be good for them and score points for us British in heaven, but will make our nation and especially the investors in such enterprises wealthy to boot. Such writers lumped Indian people together culturally and geographically, assuming, for instance, that all were subject to bloody sacrificial rites,