Belonging and Belongings: Ethnographic Collecting and Indigenous Agency at the Six Nations of the Grand River

This thesis is about objects collected from the Six Nations of the Grand River in the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, and the contexts surrounding their collection. I argue that for Onkwehonwe community members, collaborating in Western practices of collecting could serve as a strategy for preserving connections to their history for themselves and for future generations. I also suggest that this strategy was a means by which the community asserted a sense of their own place within modernity.;Although a historical study, my approach is interdisciplinary. I draw on methodological techniques from microhistory and material history, and theoretical literature about objects and materiality from the field of anthropology supports my use of objects as entry points into ways of knowing the past, or as heuristics. Third, the concept of agency emerges in my case studies in two different ways. The first relates to how collecting was a way for Six Nations Onkwehonwe to preserve connections to their history, and to assert their presence, on their own terms, within modernity. The second relates to the agency of objects, or their ability to have an impact upon people or contexts.;I draw on the writing of Susan Stanford Friedman, Marshall Berman and others to define modernity as a relational phenomenon, enmeshed with colonialism. Drawing upon the critical literature on early twentieth-century ethnographic work developed by anthropologists and scholars of cultural studies, I then discuss relationships formed between the Six Nations community and anthropologists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to highlight how collecting emerged as a point of shared interest for both groups. Next, I explore this topic through four case studies, each built around a specific object or set of objects collected from the Six Nations of the Grand River: a lacrosse stick, a wooden ladle, a beaded picture frame and two pairs of cornhusk dolls. Together, the case studies illustrate how collecting has been one way for the Six Nations community to maintain a sense of cohesiveness despite varying geographic backgrounds, splintered political and religious affiliations, and other disconnections resulting from colonialism.