Recently I attended the “Out of the Amazon” exhibit at the HMNS. It was an exhibit on the cultures of the many people living within the Amazon. While there I learned lots from the artifacts that were there, the written information, the videos, and the docent. As I toured the exhibit and took in all sorts of information on things like the food sources, rituals, clothing, housing, and just culture in general of the Amazons,
though, I noticed something odd.
I first caught wind of it while the docent was showing us the chairs that shamans sat in, which were shaped like animals to capture their spirits and give their power to the shamans who sat in them. This was very interesting in itself, but as the docent answered a question from another student and I took a moment to take in the chairs, I noticed a photograph behind them. It seemed at first to be just a photo of an Amazonian man carrying a few baskets. Something else caught my eye, though. The man was very clearly wearing a watch and a pair of jeans. How odd. I asked the docent about it, who explained he had probably traded something with tourists or anthropologists for it. That's when it hit me. This man, with items from another culture, reminded me greatly of what I had read about in “Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes, the Anthropology of Museums” by Michael M. Ames. The specific term for what I was noticing is, I believe, cultural appropriation.

It became so clear now that this is in fact exactly what I saw. This man, from a completely different culture from mine, holding an artifact from United States culture. Just as in Ames’s book, I’m almost positive that there is very little, if any, representation of US culture down in the Amazon to explain to them the significance of the watch in our country and the ways time telling affect our society. Plus, it's very possible that a very unfair trade when down when the man came into ownership of the watch. He most likely traded off some item that they have plenty of in his tribe for something as significant as a watch, basically an embodiment of the American factory system we're based on. Plus, since he’s the one in touch with his tribe members and he understands the economic system there, he could potentially make a very unbalanced deal and his American trade partners would have no idea.

I think these next 2 pictures really demonstrate how unjust this system is. We trade off everyday objects like boats, which the Amazon people take and use for their own gain, and in doing so change their own culture to the point where traditions like Yākwa are affected, and then they turn around and give us their own everyday objects, like fishing nets, which start to appear in the lives of common people here by showing up in the museum exhibits the public sees, and so our culture which was previously untouched by Amazon culture is tainted by it.
In short, what I saw at the HMNS visit was evidence that many Amazonian people are appropriating our USA culture while at the same time filling our country with fragments of their own culture.