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The first quarter of the twentieth century saw Anglo entrepreneurs rapidly develop how-to books, instructional kits, and models for the manufacture of American Indian-style baskets. Purveyors appropriated styles, stitches, and tribal names, and zealously marketed such creations as more affordable than the purchase of an Indigenous basket. Books, imported materials such as raffia and rattan, and stitching methods were disseminated not only across the country and internationally, but to American Indian boarding schools, where instruction not only resulted in appropriation, but also in deculturing the Indigenous basket and Native peoples.

Seven Central Yup'ik masks from Alaska owned by the Anima Mundi Museum, the ethnological museum at the Vatican, were examined in the museum's Conservation Laboratory over five months in 2022 by Ellen Pearlstein, in consultation with Chuna McIntyre, a Yup'ik artist and culture bearer. Technical details were documented and these together with cultural meanings were explored jointly by the two authors. The authors explored the history of Catholic missionary acquisition and technologies available to Yup'ik carvers in the 1920s, and ways in which the masks departed from traditional technologies at the time of their manufacture and were altered since then within a museum setting. Such modifications were likely designed to permit Yup'ik masks to take on different functions than sacred or social performance, such that their authenticity might be questioned. In working as co-authors, the criteria for authenticity were defined to be whether the material manifestations of these Yup'ik masks evoked the intangible meanings understood by and significant to a Yup'ik culture bearer. The masks achieve this goal, as do contemporary Yup'ik masks that introduce additional new materials and techniques. It is impossible for non-Yup'ik to decide whether masks evoke sacred and social performativity, therefore conservators of other backgrounds are advised to collaborate with community members in their assessment of culturally distant materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts early modern material culture center stage in a discussion of relational reasoning in the first age of globalization. I argue that early modern featherwork functioned as a site of innovative cultural crossings and material experiments. A combined approach of in-depth archival research and imaging technologies reveals new insights into material choices and artisanal making processes that crafted the modalities of early modern feather fans' affectivity. I argue that the so-called Messel Standing Feather Fan points to the global scale of the trade in materials, the transmission of artisanal knowledge, and the blurred boundaries of consumer cultures in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Empire. Feather fans exemplify outstanding craft cultures that brought globally traded materials into dialogue with artisans' creative skills to craft the world of affective material experiences. This study of feather fans as affective artifacts transcends the widespread fetishization of featherwork as symbols of Amazonian Indigeneity. Instead, the fan's affectivity emerged from an early modern artisan's creative response to South American biodiversity, translating Amazonian biocreativity into the material aesthetics of early modern craft cultures. Charting the significance of biocreativity in an age of globalized consumerism and colonialism, this study of featherwork reconsiders seventeenth-century Indigenous-European material cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exploration of conservation and curatorial practices surrounding Indigenous American heritage in European museums began with an American Academy in Rome Prize fellowship which served to reconnect three of the co-authors. The stunning discovery of seven Yup'ik masks from western Alaska at the Vatican Museums led two of the co-authors to connect with Chuna McIntyre, a Yup'ik artist and performer. In an effort to pilot a collaborative process where conservators and curators might have their technical and cultural understanding of these masks enhanced, a three-hour virtual meeting was arranged after the masks were documented and the images and information shared. The successes and challenges are presented here from various viewpoints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]