Perhaps it was Waugh’s lack of training that led him to explore Onkwehonwe material culture in such a broad fashion. The variety of objects, specimens, notes and photographs he obtained on behalf of the Victoria Museum resulted in an array of materials that might seem unfocused today. The collection, held at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, contains not only items related to technological processes, but also clothing, decorative items, food and plant specimens from Six Nations. In addition to objects, Waugh’s collection includes photographs, transcribed stories and notes on food preparation and plant medicines. Waugh’s personal papers are a rich textual accompaniment to the collection of objects he gathered when visiting Six Nations: his field notebooks, of which there are over a dozen, are filled with descriptions of how objects were made, who made them, from whom they were collected and, in some cases, how much he paid for them. His papers include a substantial amount of correspondence with community members and museum staff. Some letters describe specific items he collected, while others discuss his experiences in the field. Perhaps even more importantly, among numerous objects, stories and notes in Waugh’s collection, there also are voices, names and faces from the early-20th-century Six Nations of the Grand River.

Born in 1872, Frederick Wilkerson Waugh was raised in the town of Langford, Ontario, around ten kilometers north of the Six Nations of the Grand River (Fig. 1).[2] Before beginning his work in ethnology, Waugh was a magazine editor for the Toronto-based Furniture Journal. Quite possibly, Waugh’s interest in the Onkwehonwe, and indigenous cultures more generally, came about from growing up so close to the Six Nations of the Grand River, the most populous reservation in Canada and home to the largest Onkwehonwe community in North America.[3] When he began collecting material from Six Nations of the Grand River, Waugh lacked formal training, as did many people engaged in such collecting during this period when anthropology in Canada was only beginning to grow out of its amateur trappings and emerge as a professional discipline (Darnell 1976: 103; Harrison and Darnell 2006: 3-16).[4] The little experience he had was gained through work, some unpaid, with the Bureau of American Ethnology (Darnell 1976: 103). After being hired by the Museum as Preparator for Ethnology in 1913, Waugh would occasionally visit other Aboriginal communities in addition to the Six Nations, including the Anishinaabe of Northern Ontario, the Innu of Quebec and the Labrador Inuit. Waugh’s affiliation with the Museum would continue until his unexplained disappearance in 1924.[5]

While at Six Nations during his early years of fieldwork in 1912, Waugh maintained regular contact with Edward Sapir, then the Director of the Geological Survey of Canada’s recently formed Anthropology Division (Cole 1973: 33). Correspondence between Waugh and Sapir, preserved in the Canadian Museum of Civilization Archives (CMCA), reveals the ideological motivations underlying his collecting efforts. From Waugh’s expressions both of satisfaction with discovering that “[t]he Pagans have apparently been very tenacious, not only in connection with their ceremonial life, but in their material culture,” and dismay with what he described as the adoption of “modern ideas” into Onkwehonwe beadwork, emerges the tone of the late-19th- and early-20thcentury paradigm of salvage ethnography (CMCA I-A-236M, 75/158, B637, f1, February 10, 1912). With several ethnologists associated with the Victoria Museum undertaking this project, each man in the field tried to focus his fieldwork on one aspect of what was understood to be a vanishing culture. Waugh initially limited his collecting to objects “chiefly which are illustrative of technological processes” (CMCA I-A-236M, 75/158, B637, f1, January 9, 1912). One month later, Waugh alerted Sapir to a shift in his fieldwork, explaining that “[t]he idea of ‘technology,’ which I have sometimes made use of in our correspondence, seems to have widened out somewhat into that of ‘material culture,’ which would, of course, be a more inclusive term” (CMCA I-A-236M, 75/158, B637, f1, February 10, 1912). Waugh’s interest in Onkwehonwe technologies led him to document manufacturing techniques and technologies related to the production and use of lacrosse sticks.

By the time he undertook his fieldwork in 1912, it is likely that Waugh had already developed a general idea about lacrosse from reading the available scholarship on the subject. In particular, early discussions of the game focus on its resemblance to those from ages past: for example, 18th-century French Jesuit missionary Father Joseph François Lafitau noted similarities between the rules of lacrosse and those of a game called “the epicyrus” as described by 2nd-century Greek scholar and rhetorician Julius Pollux of Naucritus. Lafitau concluded from both its similarities to past games and ones played in South and North America in the 18th century that “it is not possible that the ancients did not know it” (1724/1974: 199) (Fig. 2). More than a century later, in his 1849 Third Regents Report of the University for the State of New York, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan described the ball game as “of the highest antiquity, universal among the Red races, and played with a zeal and enthusiasm which would scarcely be credited” (qtd. in Tooker 1994: 191). J. N. B. Hewitt’s short note on lacrosse (1892: Notes and News Section), described the game’s current form as “modern,” and “an adaptation of the ancient, perhaps proethnic, mode of playing the game by the Iroquois and northern tribes generally” (189). In his 1896 article entitled “Iroquois Games,” W. M. Beauchamp stated that “[a]mong ball games that of lacrosse may be the oldest remaining and the most widely spread,” and “was played for the sick” (1896: 272). Echoing Lafitau and Morgan, Beauchamp found that, like the other traditional games described in his article, lacrosse had “the flavor of antiquity” (277).

Played among the Onkwehonwe to honour the Creator, maintain the vitality of a community’s hunters and warriors, and resolve disputes between nations, lacrosse—known by the Mohawk as tewaarathon and by the Anishinaabe as baggawaty—linked Onkwehonwe tribes to each other and their history. This link, however, would be transformed by colonization. Donald Fisher has argued that as the wars of the late 18th century and colonial dynamics of the early 19th century dispersed Onkwehonwe communities on smaller reservations throughout what is now upstate New York and Southern Ontario, the ball game was no longer necessary for settling territorial disagreements (2002: 20-21). Also, the introduction and acceptance of Christianity shaped the ways in which lacrosse was played by some Onkwehonwe communities. As missionaries among the Mohawk of Caughnawagha in the early 18th century disapproved of lacrosse as a means to honour the Creator, the spiritual motivations for playing lacrosse were largely replaced by an understanding of the game as a sport (North American Indian Travelling College 1978: 35). There is evidence that other Onkwehonwe communities, however, continued to play lacrosse ceremonially. For example, in his 1898 Report for Ontario’s Minister of Education, archaeologist David Boyle remarked that while visiting Six Nations, “a dance was given and a game of lacrosse played for the recovery of a young man of the Upper Cayugas, who was ill with lung trouble” (1898: 85).

The game of lacrosse which Waugh came to know through ethnographic writing would then have differed in several ways from the sport of the same name he may have watched Euro-North Americans and some Onkwehonwe play in or around his hometown in Southern Ontario. Lacrosse was introduced to settlers in Montreal by the Onkwehonwe of Caughnawagha in the mid 19th century, with interest soon spreading to nearby areas such as Cornwall and Ottawa (Beers 1869: viii-xii). During this period, guidelines for the game developed that emphasized British sporting values of punctuality, gentlemanliness and mental strategy or “scientific play,” making it amenable to a modern, urban society (Fisher 2002: 26, 210; Poulter 2001: 215-16, 231). The publication of a pamphlet in 1860, written by George Beers, standardized field size, number of players and other elements of the game. Nine years later, Beers would publish Lacrosse: The National Game of Canada, a rulebook that would become the standard for the National Lacrosse Association, which had formed in 1867 (Fisher 2002: 267). Though Onkwehonwe craftsmen remained the main source for lacrosse sticks throughout this period, they were met with competition from Anglo-Canadians who attempted to commercialize lacrosse stick production and sale in the 1880s (Fisher 2002: 256). By the latter part of the 19th century, this Onkwehonwe sport had grown in popularity and was adopted by settlers as a symbol of a distinct Canadian identity. It was used to create a “myth of origin” which “linked members back to ‘their’ history in Canada, but in the process, effectively erased the histories of the real Canadian natives” (Poulter 2001: v).

Details related to lacrosse sticks are scattered throughout Waugh’s collections and papers. Beyond exemplifying how Waugh’s collection documents the skilled craftsmanship practised among individuals at Six Nations, together the notes and objects within Waugh’s collection contain details that evidence the permeable boundaries between game, everyday life, medicine and ceremony. In addition to purchasing at least one stick for his object collection (Fig. 3), Waugh recorded details about lacrosse sticks in several of his notebooks in relation to a variety of topics including manufacture techniques, games, stories and medicines (CMCA EA B200, f3, f6, f10, p. 5; B200R f21, f22 p. 22, f29; B201R, f7 p. 8). Such details were provided by a few different men: for instance, John Jamieson told Waugh about which woods make the sturdiest lacrosse sticks, and Chief John A. Gibson explained the process for making lacrosse strings (CMCA EA B200, f10, p. 5; CMC B200R, f21).

A man named Gus Yellow from the Oneida community provided Waugh with material on carved items in general, as well as on lacrosse sticks in particular. Included is a description of the process of steaming and shaping lacrosse sticks, accompanied by a diagram showing the tools used to bend the sticks (CMCA Digital Collection E200-6.1.003) (Fig. 4). As well, there are a series of photos in which Gus Yellow demonstrates the steaming and bending processes involved in making lacrosse sticks (Figs. 5-7). Yellow also sold Waugh a tool used for bending the sticks (CMCA III-I-404; Waugh Specimen List Jan-Feb 1912, p. 3). From reading Waugh’s notes, it is clear that Yellow was skilled in making a number of wooden items: he also provided Waugh with directions for making carved paddles and medicine masks, and made a wooden ladle used for making butter, which Waugh purchased. Yellow shared his expertise with Waugh, explaining details that would help him interpret his collections, such as how to differentiate between wooden paddles made for longhouse ceremonies and those for stirring corn soup (CMCA EA B200, f6, p. 5).[6]

The relationship between lacrosse and the Longhouse Thunder rite, a single-day ceremony performed in midsummer to honour the Seven Thunderers who cleanse the earth and offer protection from underground beings such as serpents, was documented by several anthropologists who visited Onkwehonwe communities in the mid 20th century (Shimony 1961: 162-5; Speck 1949: 117118; Tooker 1970: 34). In Waugh’s collection, the significance of lacrosse to traditionalist ceremonies comes through in the form of a story told by the Cayuga Chief David Jack. Entitled “Power received from Thunderer,” the story tells of two young boys who were befriended by another boy on their way to play a game of lacrosse. Their new friend was a human manifestation of the Thunderer spirit who, in granting them strength and power, helped them to win the game (CMCA EA B201, f24).[7]

As mentioned above, in addition to collecting information related to the making of Onkwehonwe material culture, Waugh made considerable efforts to document Onkwehonwe foods and uses of plants (Waugh 1916). One notebook of Waugh’s contains a description of a medicine related to lacrosse. Chief David Jack explained to Waugh that a lacrosse player could wash himself and his lacrosse sticks with a decoction made from the pitcher plant to increase his abilities (Fig. 8). In his words “[b]ugs and worms drop straight into the cups formed by the [pitcher plant’s] leaves and for this reason it is considered that the ball in lacrosse, for instance, will drop into player’s stick and into goal.” Chief Jack also stated that the catching ability of this plant, whose traditional name is uwà da’see, meaning “whirlwind, or everything being drawn into its leaves,” also made it a love medicine (CMCA EA B218R f15-5). Interestingly, the whirlwind spirit comes up in anthropologist Frank Speck’s publication entitled The Midwinter Rites of the Cayuga Longhouse. In it, he describes a medicine mask, called “The Whirlwind Mask” which held the ability to diffuse a tornado or windstorm when hung outside on a tree (1949: Plate V).

The lacrosse medicine described by Waugh exemplifies the sorts of material in his notebooks that could function as the ground upon which relations between material culture and traditional ideas could be traced. If nothing else, the relations explained above suggest that medicine was ubiquitous in the lives of traditionalist Onkwehonwe. This perspective on medicine was documented by anthropologist Annemarie Anrod Shimony in her ethnography of the Six Nations produced from her fieldwork between 1953 and 1958. In a conversation about traditional medicine, Shimony reported being told by a community member that “everything is medicine for us on earth, for us people, if we know how to use it.” Shimony goes on to explain, in Western terms, the broader implications of this statement:

[t]he conception implicit in this worldview … is an animistic and animatistic one, for it is the spirit force of each item, each plant, or each supernatural which is the active medical component. … Thus, if one takes an herbal medicine, for example, sweet flag … to relieve a sore throat, it is not only the herb itself which relieves the soreness, but also the spirit force of all sweet flags. (1961: 263)

Part of the challenge in making space for, and giving authority to, connections between objects and meaning which may complicate existing Euro-North American interpretations, involves a willingness to tolerate varying degrees of estrangement from things that were once familiar. The significance of this “othering” is touched upon by Bill Brown, who states that “[a]ccepting the otherness of things is the condition for accepting otherness as such” (2001: 12). The significance of a lacrosse stick to Canadian or Onkwehonwe history and culture might be enriched when placed in relation to ethnological material that shows both the processes involved in making sticks and its connections to traditionalist ceremonies.

As Chris Gosden and Frances Larson explain in their recent study of the Pitt Rivers Museum collection, “[e]ntities, be they people or things, take on values or histories given to them by their relations to others, a concept which plays down any given notion of inherent or unalterable characteristics” (2007: 7). Their approach to the Pitt Rivers Museum’s collection, which emphasizes the contingent and socially embedded nature of meaning as it relates to objects, encourages scholars of museum anthropology, and material culture more broadly, to attend closely to the role of objects in forging social relationships and the role of social relationships in forging interpretations of objects. This mode of interpretation places increased significance upon locating an item within the historical, social and cultural contexts within which it was produced and through which it has travelled. Emphasizing the relational character of meaning allows space for subjectivity and supports multivocal interpretations of material culture which can both account for and legitimize multiple, even dissonant, ways of knowing.

As I have attempted to show through the single example of lacrosse sticks, bringing together objects collected by Waugh with his notes on manufacture details, plant medicines and stories, emphasizes the richness of interconnections between elements of Onkwehonwe life. Such elements may not in fact be as separate as they appear—perhaps the divisions between game, ceremony and medicine are present in part because Euro-North American collectors of material culture brought with them their own assumptions around how to know the material culture of the community they were studying.

Whether we believe written history to be an accurate representation of a knowable past, or a useful fiction for creating “a sense of continuity, identity, and order” for both individuals and societies, the power of history to legitimize and act as a glue between people, be it families, communities or social movements, is undeniable (Smith-Rosenberg 1987: 9). In this sense, practices of re-collecting collections have the potential to revitalize material in ways that open interpretations so they might better resonate with communities, and reflect complicated histories of negotiations with both tradition and colonialization. As James Clifford has noted, “[h]eritage work, to the extent that it selectively preserves and updates cultural traditions and relations to place, can be part of a social process that strengthens indigenous claims to deep roots—to a status beyond that of another minority or local interest group” (2004: 9).

Precisely how such connections made within and through Waugh’s material might contribute to museums’ knowledge of their collections, or be of interest to the Onkwehonwe from Six Nations of the Grand River, is open for interpretation. Perhaps just as important as pinning down meaning is the maintenance of a space for possibility in which meaning or significance has yet to be determined. Recent re-conceptualizations of museum collections as contact zones by such scholars as Clifford (1997; 2004) and Peers and Brown (2003) support this position. Rather than antiquities preserved from a distant or dying culture—which may well have been how anthropologists, guided by the paradigm of salvage ethnography, understood them—when re-imagined as contact zones, museum collections become sites where geographically and historically separated cultures converge and establish ongoing relationships. This shift, as Peers and Brown explain, leads to a recognition of items in collections as “sources of knowledge and catalysts for new relationships … offering the possibility for recovering a broad range of knowledge for use in the present and future” (2003: 5).

The photos, notes and diagrams generated through Waugh’s visits to the Grand River describe the manufacture techniques used to make lacrosse sticks by people at Six Nations. At the same time, they are vessels that carry images, knowledge and voices of the community. Talented craftspeople who knew how to make traditional items, such as Gus Yellow, shared their skills with Waugh. As he collected during a period of both governmental assimilation efforts and when anthropological discourse was dominated by the salvage paradigm, it is most probable that Waugh understood his work primarily in terms of saving bits of a dying culture. But how did the community who provided Waugh with information understand their own role in collecting? And what did they hope would happen to the material they shared?

In 1999, Onondaga artist Jeff Thomas curated an exhibition called Emergence from the Shadow: First Peoples’ Photographic Perspectives, which was shown in the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s First Peoples’ Hall from 1999 to 2002.[8] This exhibition, in which anthropologists’ portraits of indigenous people were displayed along with photographic-based works by contemporary indigenous artists, evoked conversations around representation, self-representation and historical continuity. In speaking about his work, Thomas explained that his elders encouraged him to develop a view of the past that fit with his life as it is today. His responsibility, as the next generation, was “to tell my own story, not to tell theirs, but to be aware of our history and how does that evolve.” For Thomas, then, his work as both curator and artist is about “the exploration, that journey and … selfdetermination … and about access to collections and our past and our history, and about moving forward” (Hudson and Thomas 2005).[9] Interested in museum collections from a young age, Thomas continues to be inspired by material in archives and museums, using them in his own artistic work and storytelling. As the collections of ethnologists such as Frederick Waugh become increasingly accessible to their source communities, the possibility grows for new connections to be made through them—a possibility perhaps not intended by collectors, but one which holds starting points for explorations in new directions, for telling stories and crafting meaningful histories.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of Alberta Material Culture Institute’s conference, “Material Culture, Craft & Community: Negotiating Objects Across Time & Space,” May 20-21 2011. This paper grows out of my ongoing dissertation research, assisted by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. Professor Ruth B. Phillips, and co-panelists Heather Igloliorte and Catherine Hale provided useful feedback. Special thanks are extended to Shangeetha Jeyamanohar for critical comments and editorial suggestions.