PROJECT 112
If you are here, you probably followed the link on this page, experienced the AE experience, and want to learn more on the subject. If not, we invite you to take a look at it first.
The audio that you heard is a part of Project 112, a small counter-anthropological project that aims at exploring the current organization of Penn State’s collective, subconscious memory. The chosen method is semiological: we look at signs and phenomena to understand, verbalize and re-interpret them.
[ A statement on my positionality can be found below in the text ] 
The notion of “collective memory” refers to the common history shared between people in a certain place and time, but also between a present and a past, as well as between humans and non humans, living and non living.
According to the university’s website, Penn State was founded in 1855 after a farmer and ironmaster, James Irvin, donated some of his land and property to the state. In reality, Penn State benefited tremendously from the Morrill Act, an act from 1862 that decided on the creation of land-grant universities across the US. Not only had Penn State’s area been the previous land of different Native American tribes, but the university’s land grant itself came from other territories taken from more than 112 tribes, across dozens of state.
How is it possible? Because the Morrill Act didn’t only offer new in-state lands to the some states for them to build universities, it also granted out-of-state lands to a considerable number of states. These lands were then sold to fund the academic institutions where we are now studying. Some researchers (Robert Lee, Tristan Ahtone, Margaret Pearce, Kalen Goodluck, Geoff McGhee, Cody Leff, Katherine Lanpher and Taryn Salinas) have been working for years on a way to produce critical infography and cartography about what happened. You can take a look at their work here: https://www.landgrabu.org/universities/pennsylvania-state-university
Here is a map that they created to visualize the origin of the out-of-state lands that were taken through semi-legal treaties before being granted to Penn State:
What does it have to do with the PSU Bookstore?
When we take a closer look at the different treaties that Native tribes were forced to sign prior to giving up the lands which became part of the Morrill Act, we can see that a lot of them were signed either on the West coast, where most lands remained in-state lands during the creation of universities, either in some central areas, including in the Northern areas where the economy prior to the treaties had been mostly based on fur trade – a very lucrative activity at the time, that allowed some groups to survived but made them very dependant of a general economocial organization which did not consider them. Some tribes, including the Sioux, had found in fur trade a way to adjust and temporarily negociate with settler colonization. Some of them were not expelled from their lands at first, but their presence were tolerated as long as they were hunting and selling furs to different business parties, including the English, the Dutch and the French.
For a time, it is said that a fragile balance had been found between the different groups. However, not long before the Morrill Act, in Europe, the industrial revolution lead to drastic changes in fashion: the invention of mechanical looms and considerable changes in society along with deep political transformations, led to drastic aesthetical modifications and new fashion trends, including the most famous Victorian fashion trend, in the UK.
A new era was beginning, in which fur did not have much place anymore. When the demand for fur from Europe fell drastically, a lot of Native tribes and societies lost the only leverage that they had to negociate for their existence, and, with little to no access to their usual ways of living, fell into poverty. When settlers pressured them, by force or by law, to sign the often illegal treaties, they had little other choices if they wanted to survive, than to cooperate. Often, “their” lands were traded for barely enough food to survive the next winter, and no further compensation was ever provided (here, “their” is in quotation marks to honor the fact that the relationship that Native societies had with the land did not revolve around the notion of ownership).
Findings
Fashion and clothes, deemed superficial and shallow when it comes to our Western societies, are often overlooked in their significance, as the hi/story above illustrates. Clothes are objects and artefacts that are close to us and allow subconscious materials to re-appear, as their function is ambivalent: they show meaning, and veil it at the same time. I was curious to see what happened to the PSU Bookstore and its infitiny of paraphernalia, when one looked at it with all that information in mind.
In The Supermaket as a Place of Learning, F. Billmayer (1) discusses supermakets and stores as places where education occurs, i.e. spaces in which knwoledge is produced. Speaking from the position of a consumer in Western supermakets, F. Billmayer describes how we get information by looking at each other’s trolleys, which content will “give us information about taste, preferences, problems, fears and aspirations. We therefore take a glimpse, from the corners of our eyes, at the selection of our fellow consumers, a behavior that somewhat reminds me of public saunas” (p.218). Interestingly enough, the PSU Bookstore would not allow you to repeat the experience, as its main quality is to sell the same thing, with variations in terms of scales and shapes. Therefore, we can describe the knwoledge that is produced there as a form of iterative loop: when we look at the other’s trolley, we see our own choice, only slightly refracted.
Similarly, F. Billmayer discusses the similarities between museums and supermarkets, as both “present objects which are used as signs for making meaning”. Both “arrange them according to certain criteria, museums often along historical lines, supermarkets by product groups (…). Both institutions request the visitors to compare and review”. (p.122) The supermarket, as a museum, is at center of the culture, a place where the “cultural property of all the population groups are displayed” (p.223). If we agree with Butler than identity is performed, then we find the Bookstore to be a place that is actively producing an unequivocal, iterative identity, that is iterative and self-referenced. We are what we are what we are…Penn State is Penn State is Penn State….
This linguistic performance should bring our attention to its similarities with a refusal to talk or to answer a question, as well as to its ontological quality. The performed identity is a statement that does not wish to disclose anything else than itself, and tries to prevent us from any interpretation. This seemingly neutral and harmless consensus can only make us think of a screen memory, that combined to the nature of clothing, can only hints toward a more obscured meaning. Beyong the conventional criticism of uniformity as the imagination of belonging, we seek to dive deeper into this precise, unique context, in which everything functions as if to take literaly the other meaning of the word “identity” – similarity between different elements. This process hides any traces of history as well as ungoing conflicts, and produces a form of cloudy consensus that prevents us from seeing anything beyond its standardized, hermetical surface.
The Nittany Lions
The only element that indicates a sense of aesthetical singularity or historical context would be the Nittany Lion. The Nittany Lion, less as a logo than as a concept (which by far preceded the actual logo, created in 1983), has an interesting history as well. “Nittany” Lions were already largely extinct when Penn State was founded in 1855, and albeit we believe that “Eastern mountain lions had roamed on nearby Mount Nittany until the 1880s” (2), the only and last eastern mountain lion that we know of had been killed in Susquehanna County by Samuel Brush in 1956. The taxidermised individual is now displayed in the All-Sports Museum in Penn State, and as Dr. Perry – the scientist in charge of investigating the DNA of the lion in 2015 – “There are important things that we can learn from studying things that we’ve lost.” (3). While the fact that Nittany Lions were already extinct when Penn State was founded gives away their symbolic nature, the word “Nittany” itself points toward the existence of an erased hi/story.
The word ‘Nittany’, referring to Mount Nittany, is said to have an “obscure origin” (4): it is believe to be derived from the Algonquian word “Nit-a-Nee”, but the sources are deemed unreliable on the subject..Moreover, the legend from which it is supposed to be derived seems to have been entirely made up by the author and publisher Henry W. Shoemaker, whose story of Nita-Nee and her lover, Malachi Bayer, was first published in 1903. It is said that he “later admitted the various Indian names were fictitious”. In a microform presented in Penn State’s library, we can read a simplified version of the stories. In one scenario, the mythological princess Nita-Nee led her people to the “safe and fertile valley” of Pennsylvania (5) ; when she died, a mountain arose at the sight of her burial – today’s Mount Nittany. Another story or legend, according to Shoemaker, says that “the Indian maiden fell in love with a white trader who was chased out of town by the maiden’s seven brothers. Driven into a nearby cavern — Penn’s Cave — the trader died crying out for his lost love Nita-Nee”. As formulated in the microform “Little did Malachi Boyer, calling to his “Nita-nee, Nita-nee”, from Penn’s Cave, realized that some day the name of this fair Indian maid would haunt the memory of thousands. A footlose trader. He had come to the valley in search of material treasure; instead, he found and fell in love with Nita-nee, for which he was imprisoned and forced to die in the cave, by her sevn stalwart brothers”.
Our artistic proposal is to understand the Nittany Lions as the metonymic presence of the erased, absent history and actuality. As a repressed memory, it re-appears with undeterred strength, and even asks of people singular acts of magic – tributes that have to be paid to appease the collective guilt, while making sure that the real trauma does not reemerge. The word “haunted” is not chosen by chance in the article that we cited : it designates both the nature of the phenomenon (a past, traumatic sequence and its re-actualization in the present tense) and its conjuration. The clothes that contain no other design than the Nittany Lion logo and the name of Penn State (iteration), are supposed to be worn on a day to bay basis but also during fastuous ceremonies that occur on every other weekend or so – football games, various university events…Students train sometimes more than 10 hours a week simply to make sure that they will do their best to perform in the marching band. The spectacle is a screen, a way to coalesce together a past and contemporary denial, as well as to make sure that the Nittany Lions do not become vengeful by paying them a daily tribute.
Consequently, the Nittany Lions look little less than absolutely sad. You can see their tears on the Augmented Encounter and hear about some modest reflections on the subject.
No traces of history, conflicts, or differences. Yet what is Penn State? “Penn State is the Home of the Nittany Lions”, says the towel innocently.
More investigations to come as a part of Project 112. Before ending this text, I would like to disclaim my own positionality regarding the issue that I try to address:
Not being a Native American myself, I would like to find ways to address the problem of erased history/present/future within the framework of Penn State’s bookstore, but by no means would I consider myself legitimate to decide how Native Americans would like to or should be represented in such spaces. Therefore, my aim is simply to direct our gaze toward this particular issue, and to produce a critical history of the place in order to open some questions about its performing coloniality.
Sources:
1.Billmayer, F. (2015) The Supermarket as a Place of Learning, in Conversations on Finnish Art Education, Kallio-Tavin, E. (Editor). (2015). Helsinki: Aalto University
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nittany_Lion
3.https://gopsusports.com/news/2015/4/28/BLOG_The_Original_Penn_State_Nittany_Lion_Defines_History.aspx
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nittany_Lion
5. A micro form: The history of State College, 1896-1946. [microform]. by Vivian Doty Hench. Microfilm D326 reel 123.
Shakely, T.. (2013). Conserving Mount Nittany: A Dynamic Environmentalism. State College: The Nittany Valley Society
www.https://onwardstate.com/2014/02/07/the-history-of-penn-states-nittany-lion-logo/
https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_fur_trade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_fashion
Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest