[APPLAUSE]
Part one.
Just under 10 years ago, I
began my career as a curator
at the Denver Museum
of Nature and Science.
This was in the
summer of 2007 and I
got settled into my new job.
And within the
first week, I wanted
to go visit the North
American Indian Cultures Hall.
This hall was finished in
1978 and takes the visitor
on a tour of North
America through the lens
of Native Americans.
And so I started in
the Northwest coast
and headed down California
into the Great Basin.
And when I got to the Southwest
I stopped dead in my tracks
because when I got to the
section on the Hopi Indians,
I looked up and I
found this mannequin
sitting down staring at me.
And he struck me as slightly
disheveled, perhaps even
a little bit veering
towards crazy.
And I immediately went
back down to my office
and picked up the phone and
called the collections manager,
Isabelle Tovar, and I
said I'm the new curator.
Do I have the
authority to decide
what the content of this
new-- of this exhibit hall is?
And said, yes, that's
within your purview.
And so we went and got
a ladder, and we then
took down the mannequin,
which I saw was not just
a mannequin but a dummy
in the sense of how
this individual was sitting
there kind of wordless.
He was present, but absent.
He was essentially mute.
So we went and took
him down, and I
felt pretty self-satisfied using
my new curatorial authority
to make such a quick decision.
But as I familiarize myself
with the exhibit hall,
I realize that the entire hall
had all kinds of predicaments.
When I stopped and study the
Tlingit and Yupiit sections,
I saw these mannequins that were
kind of vague and almost like
ghosts.
They struck me as
individuals that
were presenting culture without
real people behind them.
In contrast in the Seminole diorama,
there was an attempt
at realism, and yet I
think they didn't
quite get it right.
The child in
particular reminds many
of the killer doll, Chucky,
from the 1990s horror film.
The Cheyenne diorama of a
family in 1864 along Sand Creek
was much more sophisticated
in its depiction
of indigenous peoples.
This one was actually
created by a sculptor who
was brought in and created
the mannequins entirely
based on a real family.
The [INAUDIBLE]
family that was then
living-- a Cheyenne family--
that was living in Colorado.
But even this one
has its limitations.
One time a Native American
in the Denver area
came and told me
about when he brought
his five-year-old
nephew to the museum.
And our museum is filled with
different kinds of dioramas,
and so first they went
to the wildlife hall.
And they saw one of
the last grizzly bears
that was killed in
the Rocky Mountains,
and the five-year-old
said, is that a real bear?
And his father-- or his uncle
said, yes, that's a real bear,
and they moved on to a
diorama filled with deer.
And the five-year-old
said, how did they
get those deer in there?
And they said, well, they
shot and killed them,
and then they taxidermied
and put them up there.
So you can imagine when he
arrived at this diorama,
his eyes got big and he
broke down into tears.
So there's a kind of
danger of hyperrealism
for Native peoples in the
Natural History Museum
where all you have is
Native peoples in relation
to dinosaurs and
dodos, the last grizzly
bear, and taxidermy deer.
So maybe you just don't go
without any people at all,
but to me these
kinds of dioramas
are another kind of
phantom presenting culture
without people,
totally divorcing
real people from real things,
so that's not a solution either.
In our museum we also
have a cigar store Indian,
which we also have on display.
And of course the stereotype
of Native American identity
isn't appropriate for
today's museology either.
So essentially, we have the
kind of dilemma, a predicament
for museums in the 21st century
where for about 200 years
or so, Native Americans
have now been presented
as objects of study in museums.
And yet we now have a
goal of not objectifying
Native Americans or any
people for that matter,
and yet when we look at,
for example, these dioramas,
it's extremely difficult
for a museum display
not to objectify a people.
By definition we have
objects in a display,
and that there's a kind of
process of objectification.
So I believe if we're going
to have a future for Museum
Anthropology, we
need to address how
Native peoples and all peoples
that are presented in museums
can become subjects
in our displays
without objectification.
So tonight I'm going to try
to address this predicament
because I think
it says a lot not
just about our current
moment but also
about the future of museums.
To really understand how
we got here, we of course
have to understand
our past, so I'm
going to talk a bit about
the history of museums,
the processes of
colonialism in particular
that have played to get us
to this historical moment.
We've very much changed
from-- as a discipline
from a colonial past into a
kind of post-colonial mode
that's fundamentally driven
by a collaborative ethic,
and so I want to lay out
the landscape of what
that looks like.
And yet I want to ask if that
is truly enough to move us
beyond the colonial
history of museums.
Do we have all
the tools in place
to truly overcome
a colonial past
and move into a
post-colonial mode?
Part two.
Considering the
origins of museums,
museums are
fundamentally constructed
so that objects can
be put on display.
That all of the
world's wonders could
be gathered under one
roof and presented
to the general public.
For this to happen,
there was very much
a kind of colonial
practice and mindset
that drove many museums.
Essentially there was
a removal of objects
from often the colonial subjects
and the periphery of colonies,
and placed in the metropole
for the benefit of people
living in large cities.
There is also very much a
kind of capitalist practice
put in place where essentially
any object, anything
in the entire world,
could be alienated,
could have a monetary
price put on it,
could be purchased and taken
and placed in a museum context.
As museums developed,
they very much
wanted to become a center place
of learning and education,
which is very positive.
But as a part of
that, too, they began
to express a kind of
exclusive authority
over the knowledge that
was being contained
within the institution.
Another key part
was the audiences
that arrived in many of these
museums were largely passive.
They were supposed to be the
recipients of this knowledge.
They were largely
in urban contexts
where there was
individuals with wealth
and largely white populations.
Some of this began to
change in the early 1900s
where museum professionals began
to talk about universities--
I'm sorry, museums as
universities of the common man.
So the educational
goal and a kind
of inclusiveness beyond
the small elite community
began to shape museum
practices into the early 1900s.
And yet even then,
museums were very
much about a
one-way relationship
where museums themselves saw
them-- perceived themselves
as being at the center of
this educational experience,
and the visitor came as a kind
of recipient of knowledge--
kind of vessel to be filled.
These practices began
to change in the 1900s,
but they did not begin
to fundamentally change
until the 1960s and '70s on
the heels of the civil rights
movement.
During that time,
Native Americans
began to demand
self-determination and
self-representation in all kinds
of institutions in the United
States and beyond.
As a part of this,
they wanted to have
a role in deciding
what museums collected
as well as what was displayed.
This was the foundations of the
modern repatriation movement
as we know it today.
I think a kind of
culmination of this moment
arrived with an exhibit-- excuse
me, a performance art piece
in 1987 by the Luiseno
artist, James Luna.
In this piece, Luna
took over a section
of the San Diego
Museum of Man where
he put his own life on display.
He put on the walls his
diplomas, his divorce papers,
and different
mementos of his life.
He then went so far as to
literally put his own body
on display, where you can
see the different labels told
micro histories of the
scars across his body.
His point was how
the objectification
of Native Americans
marginalizes living peoples.
That this naturalizing
of Native past
disregards the living
ongoing traditions
and identities and perspectives
of Native Americans today.
At the same time that these
sorts of social movements
were taking place,
there were also
transformations within
the theoretical frameworks
of the discipline.
Most notably,
postmodernism deeply
shaped museum
theory and analysis,
building on Michel Foucault's ideas of how
constructions of
knowledge is a way
to enforce power structures.
Post-colonialism and
post-colonial theory
also shaped museum
analyses, most notably
building on Said's notions
of construction of the others
and how that was a
form of domination
through colonial and
imperial practices.
And so it was through the
intersection of postmodernism
and post-colonial theory that
we begin to see museums not just
on the ground begin to
change, but also in terms
of their intellectual mindsets.
So by the late 90's, or, into the 1990s
we began to see museums
change in fundamental ways.
Museums begin to
acknowledge that they
have a need to work with
broad, diverse, varied publics,
not just urban elite ones.
They very much wanted
to build in reciprocity,
a kind of two-way exchange
into museum practices.
They also wanted to within
their exhibits and collections
be able to create spaces
for different viewpoints
and voices and values
and perspectives
so that it wasn't just--
so a museum wasn't just
a seat of a single
kind of authority,
but that there were
multiple layers of authority
brought into museum practice.
And the museum
visitor was no longer
supposed to be a
vessel to be filled,
but was actually a participant
in the construction
of their own experience
within the museum setting.
And museums became
places not just
about exhibits or
collections or even research,
but they became a kind
of community building.
Museums became a space
for relationship work.
And so we see this
transformation
of museums as a one-way
relationship between museum
and audience to a
tangled interrelationship
between the museum and different
publics that was supposed
to have some level of equity.
We can see this kind of practice
put in place with the Arizona
State Museum's Paths
of Life exhibit
which was completed in 1992,
which from beginning to end
was co-created with
Native communities
across the Southwest.
They use life
models for dioramas
as well, echoing art
museums and other museums
work to create mannequins
based on real people.
But in this case
the community itself
wanted this kind
of representation
and they sought it
out, and so the museum
was working with the
community to implement it.
So museums into the late
'90s and early 2000s became
places that were very
much not about trying
to be the sole authority, not
trying to have the sole voice,
but being a place where all
of these different issues
of economics and power
and representation
could be dealt with.
These weren't places-- you
didn't go to the museum
to have these
questions answered,
but you went to museums have
these questions negotiated.
Theoretically framing
much of this movement
was Mary Louise Pratt's notion
via Clifford, James Clifford,
around the contact zone,
which is essentially
a kind of meeting place
where different cultures come
and clash and grapple with
each other's realities often
in asymmetrical power
context such as colonialism.
When Isaac and others
have also talked
about museums at this time
a kind of mediating
space, again negotiating
all these different
and complex issues.
Part three.
So today we've seen a
fundamental transformation
of what museums can be
and often what they are.
The museum field is
very much defined
by this collaborative
ethic, this idea of building
partnerships and relationships
with source communities
with different kinds
of stakeholders.
And we can trace this
kind of broad movement
towards collaboration in
all kinds-- these are just
a small handful-- in all
kinds of writings that exists,
whether we're talking explicitly
about theory or practice
or display collections work.
Basically the
collaborative ethic totally
suffuses now, at least
at the high level
of Museum Anthropology today.
We can see this on
the ground in places
like the National Museum
of the American Indian.
This is a controversial
institution in some ways
that's been heavily critiqued,
and yet in a very basic way
the practice of a
museum identifying
individual community members
that co-create exhibits is
a model that's used throughout
the museum world today.
And these kinds of practices
don't just involve exhibits,
but also involved collections.
The reciprocal research
network out of the University
of British Columbia's
Museum of Anthropology
is one of the prime examples.
They work with 27
different institutions
to present Northwest
coast art and artifacts
and allow Native
communities and community
members to have access
to those databases
and to help contribute
their own knowledge to it.
And then that becomes the
foundation for different kinds
of research projects.
These types of revolutions have
very much informed the work
at the Denver Museum
of Nature and Science
where I'm a curator.
The museum was founded
in 1900 and has long
served the community of Denver.
In 1935, the Department
of Archaeology was formed
and that was really the
beginning of the human story
being told at the museum.
This was then amplified in
1968 when the museum received
a gift of a 12,000
piece collection, which
really changed the
ability of the museum
to tell the human story.
In 1968, the museum began
to build a permanent hall
based on this 12,000
piece collection.
And in the 1970s it began
to run into some trouble
when the American
Indian Movement,
a radical pan-Indian
political group,
began to insist that it wanted
to have a role in museum
practices in the Denver area.
They even went so far--
the AIM members in Denver
went so far as to invade a lab
at Colorado State University
where they performed a citizen's
arrest on an archaeologist
because that archaeologist
had just dug up
some graves, some
Native American graves.
They then took those
collections and said that they
were going to rebury them.
However, the
professor then later
said-- who escaped the citizen's
arrest-- that those remains
weren't of Native Americans.
That they were of-- they
were zoological collections
and others.
And so eventually
they were returned,
but this was a kind of foreshadowing of
the demands of Native peoples
who wanted a role in the museum
world in Denver and beyond.
And so in response
in 1973, the museum
created an advisory
council of Native Americans
to help guide the evolution
of the permanent exhibit
and to help bless the
permanent hall once it opened.
The museum was very
much in tune with
Native American-- urban
Native American concerns when
the exhibit opened in 1978.
It held different
kinds of symposia
on topics like land rights,
poverty, alcoholism.
They talked about the American
Indian Religious and Freedom
Act and other kinds of
laws that were empowering
Native peoples at that time.
They were very much focused
on the urban experience
and wanted to respond
to the Native community,
and there was this kind of
pulse of deep engagement
with the Native community.
And it didn't last,
but at least it
provided a kind
of example of what
was possible in the museum.
The museum has a long entangled
relationship with repatriation,
the demands for sacred
objects and ancestral remains.
But at least in 1990,
the museum very much
embraced the
potential of NAGPRA.
They wanted to do
the right thing.
They worked hard to follow
the law and return what
the law required.
So in 2007 when I
arrived at the museum,
we very much wanted to
build on these traditions.
At our museum as well as many
others throughout the country,
but also expand on them and
deepen them in some way.
We came up with this aspiration
statement as a kind of signpost
or a goal for
ourselves, acknowledging
that it would be very
difficult but nonetheless
something to aspire to.
The key phrases here
are really that we
wanted to focus on stewardship
and our role as stewards,
and the idea that we
had a responsibility
to have a kind of intellectual
framework around the objects
that we curate as well
as a deep commitment
to ethical practices.
So we first created something
called the Native Sciences
Initiative, and this had
many different programs
under this umbrella.
Starting in 2008, we began
offering scholarships
to Native American
college students
pursuing a science career.
We offer three internships
to Native American students
every year.
We have a science career--
we had a science career
day for a number of
years where we introduced
Native American scientists in
the Denver area to Native youth
to try to inspire them
towards a science career.
And we have workshops around
technology and culture as well.
We created a-- I'm sorry, we
participated in a film festival
that presents Native
American films often
by filmmakers monthly.
We've been doing that
for a number of years.
And we also created the Visiting
Indigenous Fellowship program
for Native artists to come and
use the collections to either
be-- to use it for
inspiration for their own art,
or maybe it's an
elder that wants
to reconnect with some pieces
that a grandmother made.
That can really be
anything around the needs
of an individual wanting to
use the museum as a resource.
We're lucky to have James Luna
who created the artifact piece.
He came a few years ago
and created an installation
and performed at
our museum as well.
Like the Reciprocal
Research Network,
we developed our own
project in collaboration
with the A:shiwi A:wan
Museum and Heritage
Center based out of the
Zuni tribe in New Mexico.
And this is similar to the
Reciprocal Research Network,
but instead of being
based out of the museum,
this actually originated
out of the tribe itself.
And the tribe basically
wanted to have
a database that was to benefit
its own tribal members.
So they reached out
to different museums--
ours was one of them--
and created a network
of different databases so
that tribal members could
see what museums
had because they're
unlikely to travel to
England and LA and Denver
to see everything that
their ancestors had made.
And at the same time, they
didn't want the information
within this database to reflect
only outsider museological
perspectives.
So the entire database
was structured and framed
around Zuni values, Zuni
terminology, Zuni perspectives.
And additionally then, Zunis
could comment through text
as well as video and audio.
So this was very
much an experiment
of collection database work,
but really providing the tools
to the tribe itself so that they
could create a database that
truly served their own needs.
We've also been deeply
engaged on repatriation work.
When I came to the museum,
we were out of compliance
with NAGPRA.
And so within a year
we had the museum back
on track, and a lot
of that involved
acknowledging many of the
legitimate claims that
were placed for a
number of objects
such as these from the Tlingit.
We also worked on a
number of repatriations
outside of the Native American
Graves Protection Repatriation
Act, the 1990 federal
law that establishes
a process for Native peoples
to claim different kinds
of cultural items.
We had our board approve
within our collection policy
a commitment to deal with
repatriation through respect
and reciprocity and
justice and dialogue
as kind of our guiding
virtues for any kind of claims
that would be placed on us.
We have had several
opportunities
to put this in practice,
most notably several years
ago when we returned 30 of
these wooden memorial statues
called vigango, which
are placed on the edge
of a hamlet in communities
in rural Kenya and Tanzania.
And these memorials
statues essentially
are communally owned.
No one has the right
to alienate them.
But in the 1980s, a
dealer began to have
youth who are desperate for
money steal these for about $7
apiece.
He then brought them to the
US largely and sold them
for thousands of dollars.
So these were
clearly stolen items,
and so we worked with the
Kenyan government as well as
the-- here's Denver's
mayor and a councilman
and our museum president
and CEO in order
to facilitate a repatriation to
the Mijikenda in Kenya.
We've also been
very much focused
on human remains and the
need to proactively address
the disposition of
those collections.
We started out
holding consultations
with tribes in different
regions in the United States,
so we first met with tribes
in the Rocky Mountain region,
and then the Midwest
and then the East Coast.
And we basically facilitated
consultation and agreements
with all of those
tribes across the US.
We then were left with
about 20 individuals who
we knew were Native American,
but we didn't know what tribe.
This was a very complicated
process, and NAGPRA in fact
doesn't really even have a
very good guidance on how
to deal with very broad
categories of Native identity
but lacked tribal identity.
So what we did was we
decided we would need
to try to consult
with all-- then there
were 566 federally
recognized tribes.
So we spent several years
building regional consultations
and working through
all the issues
with as many tribes that
wanted to participate
as they could, and we again
came up with an agreement.
What was left was human
remains that lacked consent
either from the individual
kin or community
and we believe were
not Native American,
but we felt we still
had something--
to do something
proactively to address
the ethical question of how we
should care for these remains.
So as my boss Steve Nash here
on the left likes to say,
we held a bad bar joke.
We invited a Catholic
priest and a rabbi
and an Imam and several
scientists, a few agnostics
and atheists, and we got
them all in a room together.
We presented them
with this collection
and we held an
interfaith consultation.
And from that agreement, we
then reburied the individuals
at a natural cemetery
in the Rocky Mountains.
So this emergent
collaborative ethic
has a few defining
features to it.
The first is that museums
are working to provide access
to these communities
that have long
been excluded from
the exhibiting
and collecting work
that museums do.
We're also working to create
opportunities for communities
to actively participate
in this process
so that they
themselves have a role
and they get to define
their own role as well.
And then finally how
things are interpreted,
how things are presented,
what the meanings of things
truly are.
Museums are-- many
museums are moving
to kind of multivocality,
a fluorescence
of many voices presenting
different levels
and different kinds of
interpretations of objects.
So, part 4.
Despite all of our
hard work, the dummies
are still in the exhibit hall.
The mannequins are still there.
And to me, this
goes to the question
of how persistent the roots
of colonialism can be.
In Colorado, you
might have it here.
There is this weed that's the
most phenomenal plant I've ever
seen, and it finds a way to
grow in little tiny cracks.
And all it needs is just
a little bit of time,
and then it plants itself
and it's impossible to pick.
You pick the top of it and
the roots are still there,
and it grows in a tree and you
cut it down as far as you can
and the roots just
won't go away.
And from those
roots over and over,
the plant grows and
grows and grows.
And this, I think, is a
metaphor for colonialism.
Where we think we have cut
some of these practices
from centuries past off,
and yet they persist.
There's a vitally
important paper
that was published in
Museum Anthropology
by Robin Boast in 2011 where
he talks about how museums have
used this framework of the
contact zone-- Mary Louise
Pratt's notion.
Where they emphasize
the contact zone
as a kind of positive way of
thinking about museums today,
and there's several parts
to the contact zone as Pratt
conceived it.
The first is what's
called transculturation,
or how different
cultures basically
transpose their different
parts and come together.
But there's a
second-- and that's
what most people talk
about, but there's
a second part that almost
no one else talks about.
And for Pratt, that's what
she called autoethnography.
And the basic idea is
that the colonized, in order
to speak to the colonizer, have
to speak in terms that only
the colonizer will understand.
And so what people do
on the periphery, people
who are being
colonized, is they have
to find a language that
can express themselves
in a way that's legible and
legitimate to the colonizer.
And no one's talking
about that, and yet that's
very much arguably a part of
ongoing museum practices today.
Last month there was a
Anti-Columbus Day protest
at the American Museum
of Natural History.
A great museum, a
great institution,
which is doing many of
these practices of working
towards a kind of
collaborative practice.
And yet in this protest,
these 200 people
were able to go to 10
different parts of the museum
and find the legacies of
white supremacy very evident,
not erased.
And nothing embodied
that more than this 1939
statue of our 26th
president, Teddy Roosevelt.
Here he sits astride a stallion
with an African-American
down on one side and a
Native American on the other.
And this symbolic
resonance of that
is very powerful given
Roosevelt's writings himself
about white supremacy
and about the need
to dominate different
races of the world.
A key part of how these colonial
practices are maintained
is through what Onciul
calls naturalized inequalities.
That there are
inequalities that persist
and museum practices that
we don't even notice.
We don't even attempt
to regulate or consider
because we just consider
it a part of what we do.
It's a part of our
everyday practice.
Of course we put
things in cabinets.
Of course we have people
pay for admission.
The kinds of things
that are just
a natural part of
the museum practice
are totally normalized so
that we don't challenge them
in any fundamental ways.
A key part of this argument
is that the inequalities
that we see in museums
aren't just in museums,
but surround us in
larger social, political,
and economic structures.
So we can think for
example about just
some very basic statistics
of Native American life
in the United States today.
Look at things like graduation
rates or life expectancy.
The top five
categories of groups
most likely to be killed by
the police of those five, three
are Native American groups.
If you think about
economics, my museum
has a budget of $36 million.
We have about 300 employees.
We do important
work, I think, but we
are kind of add on to
the educational structure
in our city.
Compare that to the
Hopi tribe, which
has 10,000 tribal members
and their government
has to provide basic services
to the entire membership
on $21 million.
So I see these kinds
of persistent practices
of colonialism seeping
into museums even
in this moment of--
this celebrated moment
of collaboration.
First is that museums continue
to retain control almost always
over money and resources.
Native peoples might be
invited in as collaborators,
but it's the museums that
have control of the purse
and decide who is getting
what for how much.
And in the control of resources
is a mechanism of power
that's leverage over
Native communities.
Secondly, we
continue to struggle
to bring in Native
professionals, academics,
and also Native audiences.
I was really excited to see
how the Hails and Edward
Hail in particular was
really focused on encouraging
Native students to become
active students here,
become students at Brown
as well as elsewhere.
And this is something that we
continue to need to work on.
It's not happening enough.
I don't think we need
a discipline that's
only dominated by Native people,
but certainly if Native people
aren't in the room then
it's that much harder
for a Native voice
to be present.
Thirdly, many of these programs
advance the goals of museums
without advancing the
goals of the communities.
So often that when we see
out of these collaborative
relationships that the
museum may get a new exhibit,
the museum may get help
reinterpreting its database.
They might present a lecture--
we presented James Luna.
We served our audiences.
But how are those
practices really benefiting
the Native communities?
Those benefits are reaped
to individuals as well as
much as institutions.
And so we need to really rethink
what we mean by reciprocity
and by what we mean by
sharing the benefits
and ensuring a two-way
flow between museums
and the communities
we want to serve.
Fourth, the rewards
within many museum systems
disfavor deep collaboration.
And what I mean by that
is like at my museum,
we are evaluated
on publications,
which is the more senior
authorship that you have,
the better.
So if I'm the first author
on a peer reviewed paper,
I get more credit than if I'm
a second or third or fourth.
Or if I don't write a
paper at all but perhaps I
do something that is very
meaningful to the community
and that benefits them, those
things I don't get credit for.
We also in museums
often, especially
in research museums
like mine, still
embrace a narrative
of discovery.
Most of the scientists
can make the front page
of our local or
even national paper
if they make a big discovery
around science, which is great.
But in anthropology
and particularly
in collaborative anthropology,
it's hard to make discoveries.
So fitting our narrative of
success and collaboration
into the existent reward
systems is very difficult.
And I think that
essentially discourages
many anthropologists
from pursuing
these kinds of
collaborative works.
And lastly, we don't
tackle often enough
the issues that are
important to the communities
that we want to connect with.
We can think of for example
the Dakota Access Pipeline
issue going on right
now, and some of you
might have seen there actually
is a petition going around
of several-- now several
thousand museum professionals
and anthropologists who
sign-- as archaeologists
as well who signed it--
and are trying to help take
a stand on this social issue.
But that's the exception
rather than the rule.
And so I think if we want to
be meaningful to communities,
we need to identify the issues
that are meaningful to them
and begin to tackle them.
This is a provocative and
powerful statement by Jim
Enote, the director of A:shiwi
A:wan Museum and Heritage
Center, and he emphasizes that
what we need is a much more
genuine, reliable, and
virtuous kind of collaboration.
Collaboration that's truly
based on virtues such as trust
and honesty and listening.
He thinks that this
is a collaboration
of a kind of higher order
that we need to strive for.
Essentially that
in order to avoid
a kind of cloaked--
colonialism that's
cloaked by
collaborative practices,
we really need to
delve into what
he describes as a kind
of pure collaboration.
Something that
most fundamentally
is two-way based on reciprocity
and ensures that Native peoples
are truly heard.
That their
perspectives are truly
included in museum practices.
So in conclusion,
what does all this
mean for the diorama dilemma?
Well, I think if we
look at how we're
going to create new
dioramas that truly embraced
this notion of a kind
of pure collaboration,
I don't have the
answer because it's
dependent on the
communities themselves.
They need to have a voice
in identifying how they want
to be represented,
but there is a project
that we've had that I think
allows a kind of window
into where we might
head, and that
is our Native Science
at DMNS project.
Our workshop in 2010,
which was created by
a Kiowa a Ph.D. student
at the University of Colorado
in the computer science program.
And Calvin had a vision of
bringing together technology,
science, and culture, and
creating a kind of venue
for Native youth
and their allies
to have a better foundation
in all of those fields
and also try to unite
them in a unique way.
And so as a project, he brought
together a Native high school
teacher, a Native intern
and 10 Native students
in the Denver area, and they
created an online platform
that is a kind of lens
to the Cheyenne diorama.
And this was a way
for them to create
a voice and a perspective
around the diorama.
But the point I
want to end on is
that just recently Calvin
and I worked on a paper,
and we submitted it
to Museum Anthropology
and it's going to
appear shortly.
But one of the reviewers in
this paper had a question,
and the question
was this project
clearly did not change any
kind of fundamental practice
at the museum.
Nothing really changed.
It was really almost
kind of a one-off.
It was an experiment
and a pilot project.
And so this reviewer
asked, well,
if nothing's really changed
fundamentally for the museum,
then how can you say this
project was a success?
That's a good question,
but Calvin's response
was the benefits weren't
supposed to go to the museum.
The benefits were supposed
to go to the Native students,
to the community
members themselves.
And so to conclude,
I want to say that I
think they're both right.
I think museums and
museum professionals,
we need to continue
to look inward,
to look at how we can continue
to change in fundamental ways.
But at the same time, we
need to look at the horizon
far beyond the walls of museums.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
