Forging Indigenous Methodologies on Cape Flattery: The Makah Museum as a Center of Collaborative Research

Reflecting On Decolonizing Methodologies

In her compelling book Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), Linda Tuhiwai Smith describes how the study of Indigenous people is part of an ongoing legacy of imperialism.¹ She describes how colonized peoples have recognized imperialism as a "discursive field of knowledge," a field that authoritatively describes and defines Indigenous identities. She argues that an imperial vision or gaze has for centuries distorted views of Indigenous people, reducing Indigenous notions of humanity, family, or gender relations, to name a few, to social constructions of what colonists and their descendants consider to be "authentically" Native or Other.² Her valuable contribution is that she augments this deconstructive critique with a discussion of how Indigenous communities, including her own Maori one, are meeting the "need to decolonize our minds, to recover ourselves, to claim a space in which to develop a sense of authentic humanity."³ To document the opening of these spaces for recovery, Smith describes a range of Indigenous projects that are developing or practicing Indigenous research methodologies.

When we learned that the American Indian Quarterly was inviting reflections on Decolonizing Methodologies, we decided to join others in offering an account of how Native American community museums and cultural centers are among those projects that can create a space for recovering traditional knowledge and countering dominant ideologies.⁴ If the decolonizing project is to "carve a space where Indigenous values and knowledge are respected; to create an environment that supports research and methodologies useful to Indigenous nation building," then tribal museums and cultural centers are emerging as a promising space for this work.⁵ The case of the Makah Cultural and Research Center (MCRC) also offers the opportunity to describe the nature of doing this work with those whom Mihesuah and Wilson call "non-Indigenous allies."⁶

Recovering Traditional Knowledge In Native American Museums And Cultural Centers

The MCRC on the Makah Indian Reservation in Washington State is one example of a large number of Indigenous museums and cultural centers that have emerged throughout the Western Hemisphere, beginning predominantly, but not exclusively, in the latter half of the twentieth century.⁷ Currently, more than one hundred Native urban and reservation communities in the United States host a wide variety of tribal museums.⁸ Collectively, these tribal museums have generated practices and representations that can offer substantive alternatives to stereotypic or anachronistic images of Native peoples. They have also served a vital function in remediating some of the dehumanizing historic practices of museology (such as collection and exhibition of human remains).⁹ In some communities, tribal museums can serve as an important anchor for training and employing tribal members in a community-directed cultural- or eco-tourism project.

Most relevant to our reflection upon Decolonizing Methodologies, however, is that tribal museums and cultural centers can serve as a tool to reclaim practices based upon traditional values; they also can serve as a base for conducting research whose ethics and design are relevant to community needs. Tribal museums, like museums in general, find themselves at the intersection of several media and technologies for representing culture and history, including academia, museology, and popular culture. This makes them a particularly effective space for what Smith calls "researching back" or what Erikson calls "museum autoethnography."¹⁰

In the case of the MCRC, the museum is staffed by nine Makah tribal members. The staff faces the challenge of meeting the expectations and needs of the tribe, in part, conveyed by the twelve-member, all-Makah Board of Trustees, while they negotiate the expectations of colleagues in the international field of cultural preservation and its associated disciplines. This movement of Makah researchers between different spaces and systems for constructing knowledge has involved a significant amount of collaborative research with non-Native colleagues. We are not speaking here of "collaboration" where...