After two failed lawsuits in French courts this year to stop auctions of sacred objects, the Native American Hopi tribe had a small victory on December 10 when the Los Angeles-based philanthropic organization the Annenberg Foundation announced that it had stepped up in the second auction to buy 21 Hopi items, along with three originating from the Apache people, from Paris’s EVE auction house. The Foundation would return the objects to the tribes, it said. “These are not trophies to have on one’s mantel,” said Annenberg Foundation Vice President and Director Gregory Annenberg Weingarten in a statement.
In November, the Hopi had taken EVE to court in an effort to stop the sale of 25 sacred masks included in the December 9 auction, artifacts dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that, according to Hopi tradition, contain divine spirits. On December 6, the French court ruled that the auction house was within its rights to sell the items as they were not connected to human remains and therefore their sale did not violate French law. While the Annenberg Foundation’s purchase reclaimed a large portion of objects this time round, the Hopi expect more legal battles in the future. ARTINFO spoke to Sam Tenakhongva, a cultural leader in the Hopi community in Arizona and a driving force behind the legal action.
Why were you fighting to stop the sale of these masks?
Well, we don’t call them masks.
What do you call them?
They are our friends. They are an integral part in our spiritual and cultural life and that’s why we refer to them as such. They play a significant role in our cultural identity. They are living beings. They are a part of us. The spirituality they represent for us is really significant; therefore, in regards to the sale or any auction, we take offense to that because of that fact.
Did you know that the Annenberg Foundation was going to buy these objects?
We didn’t know their motivations. We were focused on the legal challenge and the legal battle and having our items removed from the sale so we could have time to investigate and look into and prove provenance and ownership. When we found out about the court decision the previous Friday to the proposed sale we went into it knowing that they hadn’t decided in our favor and we would have to leave it up to our hopes and prayers. We had no idea that the Annenberg was planning to do that on our behalf.
Have you worked with them in the past?
We haven’t previously worked with them or talked to them.
Is there a specific group or organization that you work with when you’re trying to get these objects back?
I have a regular eight-to-five job, which is with the Hopi Education Endowment Fund. We’re charged with raising funds to support educational opportunities for Hopi students, including college scholarships. Outside of that, my religious and cultural responsibilities lie within my community and my village and with the tribe as a whole. It’s not volunteer, it’s not something I’m paid for, it’s something I’m charged with by my family, by my clan, by my people.
So in your cultural responsibility to protect these sacred objects are you working with other members of the tribe? Who did you work with on the lawsuits?
There are several different layers. I contact other leaders who are charged with similar responsibilities throughout our villages. From there we look at our tribal government who have connections to higher levels of government like the State Department who can correspond with other international offices to help do this work. Going back to the previous auction in April [— a sale by French firm Neret-Minet Tessier & Sarrou that the tribe sued to stop, but that went ahead and generated €930,000 in sales after a Paris court ruled it legal —] what we found out is there’s a lot of support for us. There’s more talk going on around this issue, not just related to Hopi, but other groups throughout the world. It really is on an international level. It just so happens that with ours there’s such a big collection of our objects and it made such an impression in the media that we’ve kind of been put to the forefront. We’re working with limited resources, but to be able to get it this far for people to discuss and to think, I think we’ve come quite a long way. But the work isn’t over.
Is there a group of people who meet and strategize when these types of issues with sacred objects come up?
There’s a select group of people. Throughout this process, we’ve been working with other native nations in discussions and talks because they’ve had similar issues as well. We’re looking forward to trying to get a consortium of people together to really start discussing different alternatives, different methods to remove some of these concerns and issues in the future. At the moment it’s really been a select group of people, myself, our cultural preservation office, as well as Survival International[, a Los Angeles-based philanthropic organization,] and Pierre Servan-Schreiber, our lawyer, who we’ve been working closely with.
You’re hoping to form an inter-tribal group that can more specifically work on getting these types of objects back?
It’s really about a strategy of how to protect what’s here, strengthen what we already have in place, because there are laws for the U.S., and create more language so when it becomes a case such as we had in the [French] court, so there [will be] laws and language put in place that will be recognized. Currently it's not as strong as it can be, not as clear as it can be.
What type of laws do you want to see put in place?
That’s up for debate. We have to really be thoughtful and think about how it really affects us. What we want to do is create something to protect what we have and what we deem significant. When we bring those to the courts, that they are recognized as such.
You’ve gotten public support from David Killion, the U.S. ambassador to UNESCO, on this issue. Does that feel like some sort of progress?
On some level, but it’s kind of difficult. Last time, in April, it was a short process. This time, since we had been through it before, we really knew what we needed to do. It was really great that we were able to get to the right people and have them step up and make a statement on our behalf.
Do you think auction houses do these sales in France because they feel like they can get away with it there and they couldn’t here?
Going back to April, when we first started investigating and researching these types of sales, I came across numerous articles [about] people facing with the same challenge. Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, a lot of South American countries, even African nations. A lot of their items being put up for sale in the country of France. What I’ve come to recognize and realize is that they view things from a secular perspective where spiritual beliefs are oftentimes put to the side, especially if it’s not understood. Once something is transported or taken away from where it originated, it loses all sacred value. In this case if it went from one French citizen to another French citizen it’s seen merely as a transaction. We have to go back further and visit the origins of that. Were they given the authority? Was it a legal transaction? For the Hopi, it’s not. These sales are continuing to happen, some of them on a small scale, some of them on the scale of this one. The way that their courts and their laws are interpreted we have to understand that it is in another country. They have their sovereign rule, but it also has to be considered how other people around the world are viewing these things.
So would you call yourself an activist for your community?
I wouldn’t label myself as an activist. I’m a member of the tribe and I’m charged with certain cultural obligations and responsibilities and unfortunately this has become part of it, to protect what we deem valuable and culturally significant to us. In the Hopi perspective, I work for everybody. Not just for my people or my family, but for all humanity across the world. If something good can come from this and the work that we are doing for others, then it’s all the better.
