Conservation Error Ruins Secret Smithsonian Collection
Edwin Cooper discovered the leak during an otherwise ordinary walk of his usual rounds early last Friday morning. The building where Edwin until very recently worked is unassuming from the exterior - its corrugated steel walls and blue roof are very much alike any other rural New England industrial warehouse, as is the barbed wire fence enclosing the building's grounds and the small security outpost guarding the only road in or out of the small compound built from portable structures which serve as break-rooms and supply storage for the facility's staff. What the facade conceals, however, is far from ordinary.
Edwin's rounds were like clockwork - they began at 3 AM when one of his colleagues would relieve him from the first half of his shift at the guard post, where he would take fifteen minutes to refreshen himself in the break room with a cup of coffee and yesterday's newspaper. After he finished his break, Edwin would exit the poorly ventilated portable structure and make his way into the warehouse - there, he would spend another fifteen minutes doing a cursory sweep with his flashlight. "That's the only time we would ever find anybody, " he explains. "Usually teenagers breaking in on a dare or looking for somewhere to smoke before they had to get to school." Edwin's shift ran from midnight to 6 AM, after which he would return home so he could get his three children - Gabriel, Annette, and Michael - ready for school. When he talks to me, I can see the deep bags under his eyes and the heavy lines in his face: the toll of fifteen years supporting his family on a graveyard salary. "There wasn't anybody that morning - I did scare off a raccoon, though." After sweeping the warehouse, the true purpose of Edwin's job began.
He would head into the back of the warehouse to a gender neutral restroom door locked with a combination code lockbox. Instead of entering any numbers on the box, Edwin would key his way through by pressing his thumb onto the men's symbol's head to activate the fingerprint reader hidden inside the tacky signage. Behind the bathroom door was not toilets, but an elevator down to the real facility: a hidden network of sub-levels which constitute a secret storage facility for the Smithsonian museum. "We didn't have authorization to go to the basement," he tells me. "That was just for the researchers - we only ever went there if they needed help carrying something heavy, and we never got to go into the labs." Edwin's concern were the five archival sub-basements and the tens of thousands of artifacts they stored, all of which were neatly packed in wooden crates carefully labeled with manifests of their contents. "My job was mostly checking the walls and the crates for damage," he explains to me. "The facility had lots of problems with mice, rats, snakes, that sort of thing getting in through cracks in the concrete. Anything that got in could damage the collections, so I was supposed to survey all the walls and write up a report of any wear and tear in found." The walls were sectioned off into ten by ten foot squares, each of which had a serial number and a line on Edwin's checklist where he could record any damage. "It was hard at first, but you get used to it over time. It becomes subconscious - your mind gets reshaped into thousands and thousands of little gray squares, like the building is part of you, so that when something is wrong you just know it. There wasn't anything wrong that morning, so I decided to go a bit faster so that I could maybe finish early and get a little sleep in before I had to drive my kids to school." Unfortunately, sub-level five proved Edwin wrong.
"It was coming from a big crate in the back corner. The panels had burst open a bit, like this," he says and gestures with his hands to show how the front panwl of the crate had come away from the side panels and the lid. "It was this thick, ugly, red brown slime - all gooey and stringy, and it was spilling all over the floor, all over everything." He gestures again, swirling his hand in a wide circle, and his eyes leave my face to get lost in the memory. "There was a huge amount of the liquid, like an aquarium tank had burst inside the crate and blew it open, and it smelled like blood. The smell was powerful - like it was coming from inside my head. In the moment, I forgot all my training; all I understood was that there was a crate of history in front of me and that every moment it stayed how it was, it got less likely any of it could be saved." Edwin ran to the crate, grabbing the edge of the panel and ripping it open with his bare hands. "So many things spilled out - hundreds of small artifacts, all covered and soaked in the slime. I was confused, at first - I remembered the manifest on that crate. It was labeled as being full of unused tank components from World War 2. Then something I recognized hit my shoe, and then I saw the rest." Tears start to form at the corner of Edwin's eyes and I ask him if he wants to stop the interview, but he waves me away and swallows to compose himself. "It was a small cloth doll of an Indian girl - all soaked and destroyed from the slime, but I recognized it perfectly. It was my grandfather's doll, passed down to him by his mother, and her mother, and all the way back to before." Edwin chokes up at this point, and I ask him if he wants to stop, but he insists we keep recording. "The doll was from before my family was called Cooper; it was the last thing my grandfather had left from before we were forced to move to Oklahoma. There were countless other things too: clothing and headdresses and blankets and treaty belts, all stolen, all destroyed." It's at this point Edwin breaks down, but before I can ask, he insists on continuing the interview. "It's important people hear this story," he says. "It's important that people understand that it's not just things, it's someone's friends, someone's family. My grandfather studied anthropology at Harvard - he took the doll with him and he specialized in the history of our tribe. The doll went missing during a trip he took to the Smithsonian as part of his dissertation. He insisted they stole it, but nobody listened. When NAGPRA passed in the 90s, he tried to take it to court, but by then he'd already lost all of his connections in academia." Charles Cooper - Edwin's grandfather - continued to file claims under NAGPRA against the Smithsonian until he died of a heart attack in 2007. "Grandpa was only 67 when he died; the doctors said it was his diet, but we all knew it was stress." Edwin takes a moment to compose himself, and I offer him a coffee. He accepts, and we pause the recording for 15 minutes. "There was only one artifact in the crate that wasn't destroyed - it looked Greek, a big bronze vase with a pair of snakes sculpted to wrap around it. I'm sure it was stolen too, though not from us. I don't remember how long I was down there sifting through the slime, looking for anything that had survived, but it must have been a while because the next guy found me after I didn't come back out. The Smithsonian fired me after that - they said I breached contract when I opened up the crate, threatened me with lawyers and the NDA I signed like they didn't have blood on their hands."
Edwin is expected to appear in court in the following weeks to testify on behalf of the Choctaw nation. In the meantime, if you wish to support him, please....
NPR, This American Life, Interview with Edwin Cooper by Angela Schultz.
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