Castle McLaughlin
Photo courtesy of J. K. O’Donnell.
Associate Curator of North American Ethnography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University.
Social anthropologist Castle McLaughlin is Associate Curator of Native American Ethnography at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, steward of the surviving Native American objects acquired by Lewis and Clark. Her book on that collection, Arts of Diplomacy, was published in 2003, before the grizzly claw necklace was “rediscovered” in the museum. She is currently co-curating an exhibit of Plains ledger drawings with Lakota artist Butch Thunder Hawk.
Contribution
The Lewis and Clark’s bear claw necklace, recently ‘rediscovered’, is described and analyzed and suggests some of the many meanings and provocations related to it.