CHIP COLWELL-CHANTHAPHONH Denver Museum of Nature and Science Sketching knowledge: Quandaries in the mimetic reproduction of Pueblo ritual ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the quandaries of knowledge reproduction and preservation raised by the Henry C. Toll Collection of sketches, curated at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, depicting the religious ceremonies of 18 Pueblo tribes. The collection provides unique insight into the interrelationships between power and image making, intellectual property and secrecy, and museum practices in an age of ethical engagement with descendant communities. I explore these themes in the context of the Pueblos’ historical struggle to control images, the Toll Collection’s formation, and ethnographic interviews with Acoma, Hopi, Laguna, and Zuni cultural leaders. [knowledge, intellectual property, museums, ethics, secrecy, art, U.S. Southwest] The tourists invaded the Indians’ privacy, photographing holy objects and the sacred dances ... The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. —Susan Sontag, 1977 I n 2005, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS) accepted a donation of 478 individual sketches depicting religious ceremonies of the Mescalero Apache, Navajo, and 18 Pueblo tribes. Drawn be- tween 1968 and 1991 by Henry C. Toll, an avocational artist, these pencil sketches provide detailed portraits of the personages who present themselves at the religious rituals and public dances in Native American communities of northern New Mexico and Arizona. Since at least the 1870s, many of these Indian communities have struggled to delimit the image-making practices of outsiders, and, since the 1970s, virtually all of them have banned photography, painting, and sketching during cere- monies. 1 Toll respected the rules about sketching the dances in person at the Pueblos. But he was able to create these images with his eidetic mem- ory: Toll regularly traveled to dances; memorized the dancers’ attire and movements; and, later, in the privacy of his home, created the pencil draw- ings and notes that would serve as the basis for subsequent paintings. Toll’s work has served—in Sontag’s (1977:64–65) formulation—to simul- taneously appropriate and preserve Native American religious tradition, paradoxically risking a community’s spiritual desecration in the artist’s search for a visual consecration. Toll’s renderings consequently raise ques- tions about the processes by which the sacred can be profaned through the material reproduction of intangible cultural knowledge. In particu- lar, the Toll Collection relates to three lines of inquiry: into the interrela- tionship between power and image making; intellectual property vis-` a-vis questions of privilege, control, access, and secrecy; and museum curation practice in a new age of repatriation and ethical engagement with source communities. In this article, I explore these problems in the context of Pueblo culture in the southwestern United States. 2 Since the first Euro-American–led ex- peditions to the Southwest in the 1850s, Indigenous peoples have been AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 451–467, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C  2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01316.x