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Abstract
The Thin Red Line: Native American Culture Bearers, Memory and the Museum examines how the collective memory of four Native American groups, the Pequot, Mohegan, Tongva and Piscataway, was preserved to the present day. This dissertation defines the role of those individuals that became “culture bearers,” and looks at their importance both in preserving tribal identities and for those who would establish tribal museums. In the post-contact Diaspora, collective memory of these four groups transformed—from collective memory of coherent indigenous communities, to individual memory of widely scattered culture bearers. Just as indigenous communal memory was contracting the conquerors were building museums that featured self-interested narratives of “primitive” and “vanishing” Indians to expand Anglo-American collective memory and national identity. The American Indian Movement of the 1960s transformed culture bearing, memory and the museum. The thin thread of collective memory carried by earlier culture bearers became the foundation for a new collective tribal memory, albeit one woven out from a thin thread and transformed to serve tribal needs in the present. The post-AIM culture bearers also expanded memory by taking back sacred tribal lands and by making sure their memories were rewoven into national collective memory. Finally, they built tribal museums as a means to project tribal narratives and institutionalize the legacy of their culture bearers. Museums founded upon the legacy of culture bearers will share characteristics of the revived collective memory. Examinations of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Tantaquidgeon Lodge (the biggest and oldest tribal museums) illustrate that such museums inevitably reflect their reliance on a very thin line of transmission. Finally, this dissertation maintains that the culture-bearer museum, while a powerful locus of tribal memory, cannot and should not usurp the unique position of living culture bearers.
