Museums, anthropologists, and archaeologists throughout the United States had, until recently, been focusing on collecting Indigenous artifacts, possessions, and other records as a means of remembering cultures that were “inevitably” bound to go “extinct” due to settler colonial processes of European destruction, incorporation, and replacement. As author David Chrisinger wrote in an article for the University of Chicago, anthropologists didn’t understand that “…by separating tribes from their material history, they were harming the very cultures they sought to preserve, and losing crucial context.” It wasn’t until the establishment of institutions, like the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in 1989, that efforts of Indigenous preservation shifted from a rash effort to collect symbolic items and objects to a more deliberate, careful approach of dialogue with Indigenous communities that includes understanding the context behind the objects museums have used for exhibition.
The NMAI was established through the NMAI Act of 1989, which additionally required the cataloguing and repatriation of Indigenous remains, artifacts, and excavations to any federally recognized tribes or individuals who requested such items. Digital repatriation efforts, which include films, recordings, and photos of Indigenous communities, have fallen to the efforts of the NMAI Archive Center, who in the past have worked on the preservation of films, such as those of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico. The work of the Archive Center is focused on preserving such films and working with the intention of preserving endangered languages, reviving traditional cultural customs, and, as Jennifer O’Neal put it in an essay appearing in Museum Anthropology Review, the “creation of new knowledge stemming from the return of digitized material culture” (page citation here).
Recently, Cynthia Chavez Lamar was named as the next director of NMAI, making her the first Indigenous woman to lead it. Before her work with the NMAI, she, along with the Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, helped to develop the “Guidelines for Collaboration.” These guidelines outline for tribal communities and museums best practices when working in the area of cultural preservation. They foster deeper learning with regard to how museum staff can be more sensitive to the concerns and practices of Indigenous communities. They also show how these best practices provide more opportunities for meaningful partnerships between tribal communities and museums. This work allowed Chavez Lamar to help increase the museum’s record of online Indigenous collections between 2014 and 2020, as well as supplement a technical assistance program that empowered Indigenous communities to reconnect with the records obtained by the museum.
The Indigenization of leadership at NMAI, as well as the establishment of boundaries for how Indigenous peoples and museum curators collaborate on preservation projects, speak to the dismantling of settler colonialism over such collections. Instead of the rugged and brutish preservation efforts of the past, this new system of consideration of Native perspectives, a formal process for communicating grievances between both sides, and knowing what ought and not ought to be shared will help to dramatically improve not only how historians, anthropologists, and others view Indigenous peoples, but also how the American public at-large sees the richness and diversity of Native cultures everywhere.
Bibliography
Chrisinger, David. “Exhibition Upends Traditional Representations of Native American Cultures.” University of Chicago News, 5 Mar. 2020, https://news.uchicago.edu/ story/exhibition-upends-traditional-native-american-representations.
“Cynthia Chavez Lamar Named Director of the National Museum of the American Indian.” Smithsonian Institution, 19 Jan. 2022, https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/cynthia-chavez-lamar-named-director-national-museum-american-indian.
O’Neal, Jennifer. “Going Home: The Digital Return of Films at the National Museum of the American Indian.” Museum Anthropology Review, vol. 7, no. 1-2, 12 Jan. 2014, pp. 166–184.