What started as a one day event at the San Diego Museum of Man has now extended into a multi-year project with anthropologists and researchers at the National Museum of Natural History and Osage and Kiowa communities.
After producing the 2016 Parkeology project Facing Artifacts, which looked into the creation and display of hundreds of plaster life casts of Native Americans by 20th century physical anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, we were left with many questions. The biggest question was if present day descendants of these face casts knew that replicas of their family members faces were in museum collections. We also wanted to know more about the research methods and theories that motivated the production of these face casts.
Through a twist of fate, Gwyneira Isaac, Curator of North American Ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History was in San Diego and attended Facing Artifacts. Not only did we get to meet her, we cast her face, and she joined as special guest on Channel Parkeology. An affinity was struck, and we started to work together.
When visiting Gwyn at the National Anthropological Archives in May 2017, another serendipitous moment occurred: we met Larry Taylor. Larry Taylor is an Oklahoma based Smithsonian Fellow working to reconnect Osage and Kiowa community members to their ancestors whose faces were cast by Smithsonian anthropologists. 14 years ago, Larry Taylor discovered that his wife’s Grandfather, Albert Penn, had been cast by Micka, an assistant of Hrdlicka. Since then, Larry has been doing the difficult detective work of identifying living family members of the face casts and busts from often incomplete collection information.
By working closely with collections manager and physical anthropologist Dave Hunt, replicas of the busts have been returned home to the Osage Nation Museum and the Kiowa Tribal Museum. For many families, they are seeing their ancestors face-to-face for the first time. As part of this ongoing project, we have begun to work with the Smithsonian oral history program Recovering Voices to interview ancestors about their relationships and memories to the face casts.
