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In 2002, the Oberlin College Department of Anthropology returned to the Nez Perce Tribe a twined root bag that had been lost in their collections for over a hundred years. It was part of a group of bags once housed in the Oberlin College Ethnographic Collection, most of which were given in trust to the Ohio Historical Society in the mid-20th century, and which the Society subsequently sold to the Nez Perce Tribe. Decades later, Professor of Anthropology Linda Grimm and her students located one last bag amongst Oberlin’s Ethnographic Collection and convened the campus symposium, Closing the Circle, to repatriate the bag directly to the Nez Perce.
Repatriated Bag
Here we provide information on traditional methods of twined bag construction and use in the Columbia River Plateau region, interspersed with a written description of the repatriated Nez Perce bag by the specialist Dr. Mary Schlick.
Spalding-Allen Collection
The repatriated bag was collected by Henry Harmon Spalding, missionary to the Nez Perce, in the 1840's, and was originally part of the Spalding-Allen Collection that is currently on display at the Nez Perce National Historic Park in Spalding, Idaho. Dudley Allen was an Ohio-based physician and a friend of Spalding who coordinated Spalding’s donations to the Oberlin College Museum.
To read more about Spalding and Allen, click here.
Symposium
The Closing the Circle symposium featured lectures on the history of the Spalding-Allen Collection and the development of flat twined weaving in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as panel discussions on museum collections and repatriation of Native American cultural patrimony. Speakers included Dr. Mary Schlick, Lynette Pinkham and Josiah Pinkham of the Nez Perce Tribe, Dr. Steven L. Grafe, Dr. Joyce Szabo, and some of Oberlin’s own scholars of material and museum culture.
To learn about the symposium, click here.
Exhibition
In tandem with the symposium, Linda Grimm and her Museum Anthropology students curated the exhibition, Qaqa'pe: Flat Twined Bags of the Columbia River Plateau, at the Allen Memorial Art Museum (April 10-June 2, 2002). An exhibition on the early missionary movement in the Oregon Territory was simultaneously launched at Oberlin’s Mudd Library.
Highlights of the Qaqa'pe exhibition are captured in the image gallery section of the website and accompanying descriptions of the bags on display.
Galleries
Bags included in the Qaqa'pe exhibition represent the work of the Nez Perce, Yakama, Umatilla peoples. Items on display were loaned from Mary Schlick’s private collection, the Southwest Museum (Los Angeles), and the University of Colorado Museum.
Other Links
This page is a virtual version of the exhibition, with background information on the people as well as the events surrounding the twined bag’s return to the Nez Perce Nation.
The following links provide more information about Nez Perce cultural objects and the institutions involved in the repatriation and symposium: