UO museum exhibit asks whose stories define America at 250

A COVID-19 mask made from bark cloth. A seal skin kayak. Broken dishes from a Chinese restaurant excavated from under what is now the 5th Street Public Market.

That’s just part of what the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History has on display in its exhibit commemorating the United States’ 250th anniversary. Curators and staff wanted the exhibit, a year in the making, to transcend traditional Western timelines and borders by focusing on the histories of Indigenous and other communities of color. 

“America at 250—Before, Between, Beyond” features ancient and modern objects, and wall-mounted text panels are in three languages: English, Spanish and Chinuk Wawa, a trade language that originated from Indigenous tribes in the Pacific Northwest. 

“‘America 250’ is about commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but there’s this deep timeline, millennia before that, in this place we call America,” said curator and museum executive director Todd Braje. “We wanted to think about, ‘What does this American experiment mean for the diverse communities that have participated in it, and what will it mean moving forward?’”

Curators selected the objects on display from collections rarely seen by the public, Braje said. As the official repository for state cultural and paleontological materials, the campus museum holds hundreds of thousands of artifacts. 

David Lewis, an assistant professor of anthropology and Indigenous studies at Oregon State University and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, sits on the museum’s advisory board and suggested the Chinuk Wawa translations. 

He said with the exhibit, the museum is one of the only nontribal museums in the state to feature the language. It’s a hybrid of several Indigenous languages, as well as English and French, which was commonly used for communication between tribes in the Pacific Northwest for trade and kinship. Fur traders, explorers, settlers and missionaries later broadly picked it up, he said.

Local tribes like Grand Ronde have worked to revitalize the use of Chinuk Wawa, which is taught at Lane Community College. 

“It was tribes, pretty much, that owned everything and were the predominant culture at the time, so I thought that would be more appropriate than only an English exhibit,” Lewis said.

Behind the glass

Here’s a breakdown of three objects featured in the exhibit that capture the scope of “America at 250.”

1. Seal-skin kayak from Umnak Island, Alaska 

A large two-person kayak, likely used for hunting, is the centerpiece of the exhibit. It was made in the early 1900s by the father of Afenogin Ermeloff, a man from the Unangax̂ tribe of the Aleutian Islands, which are between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. 

Ermeloff’s father tightly stitched together seal skins to cover the wood frame, making it both “extremely watertight” and light, less than 30 pounds, said Lexie Briggs, the museum’s marketing and communications specialist. 

The kayak is from the museum’s Jensen Collection, the largest collection of Alaskan and Arctic items in the continental United States. 

“This is a rare example of a 125-year-old or so kayak,” Braje said. “It’s not unfamiliar to people who recreate in Oregon. This form has been in use for millennia by Indigenous peoples.”

2. Chinese brown-glazed stoneware, “Four Seasons” bowl fragment, porcelain teacup fragment with longevity symbol from Eugene

Fragments from a Chinese restaurant and a gift shop from the early 1900s in Eugene sit in a wall-mounted case nearby. Museum archeologists excavated the objects in a survey before the 2019 expansion of the 5th Street Public Market, according to a 2022 university release.

The owners of the stoneware, Wing Kee Westfall and his wife, Marie Westfall, ran a restaurant and the Hung Wo Chang & Co. gift shop on Sixth Street, now near Urban Waxx, in the 1910s and 20s. 

The couple volunteered in food conservation and for the Red Cross during World War I, according to a 1917 Eugene Daily Guard article.

Before the 1870s, there were no records of Chinese people living in Eugene, former City Manager Jon Ruiz said in the release. 

Wing Kee’s father, Jim Westfall, was prominent in the Corvallis and business communities. He was denied citizenship in 1886 due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first major federal law to restrict immigration to the United States based on nationality and race. The act was repealed in 1943. 

“We think about pioneer groups who came here to settle, but we often don’t think about the other kind of diverse ethnic groups that carved out a life for themselves and struggled to make it in this place,” Braje said.

3. Siapo bark cloth and Siapo face mask from Tutulia, American Samoa

Two barkcloth fabrics, separated by a century in time, are tucked into a corner in the back. 

The older, circular Siapo — a form of bark cloth, also known as tapa cloth, painted with patterns resembling the local flora and fauna — is from the early 1900s. 

The COVID-19-style face mask was made by Samoan artists Su’a Uilisone Fitiao and Reggie Meredith Fitiao from the same material in 2022. 

The textile, originating from Pacific islands like Samoa, is made from pounding and soaking the inner bark of mulberry trees into wide, soft sheets. 

Researchers from American Samoa came to examine tapa cloths stored at the museum in 2022 as part of an extensive, worldwide study of the materials, Briggs said. The face mask on display was a gift from their team after finishing the project. 

The Smithsonian Institution’s own 250th anniversary exhibit, which features objects from every U.S. state and territory, features the Samoan tapa cloth face mask the museum was gifted by the same researchers — though UO’s display came first, Braje joked.

Take a visit?

The America at 250 exhibit will be on display at UO’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History through March 2027. 

Located at 1680 E. 15th Ave., the museum is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Thursdays until 8 p.m. General admission is $7. 

“I think that people walk in here with a lot of preconceived notions about what it’s going to be,” Briggs said. “This isn’t an exhibit where we had sort of a full storyline. It’s more about the experience of, what does America mean, and what can it mean?”