Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives

Creation of the Tribal Museum

251 Creation of the Tribal Museum brenda j. child Tribal museums are unique institutions and their proliferation today is an affirmation of how history can empower Indigenous people. American Indian and First Nations peoples have not always been empowered by history or museums. In a number of ways, the tribal museum exists to contest and critique colonial notions of American and Canadian history that have been so disempowering to tribal nations. Revising history is not their only purpose. Tribal museums must serve the varied needs of Indigenous communities, whether that means undertaking historic and cultural preservation projects; teaching children from the tribe; restoring dignity to elders; or educating a broader public on Indian history, politics , culture, and sovereignty through tourism. Tribal museums remind us that North America is still a place of hundreds of diverse nations, each possessing distinct historical traditions and ways of interpreting and defining history, with dynamic cultural practices that predate the nationstates of the United States and Canada. The tribal museum is not a new institution in Indian Country. The first tribal museums in the United States emerged in the mid-twentieth century . The Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, was constructed as a Works Progress Administration (wpa) and Civilian Conservation Corps (ccc) project that opened to the public in 1938 and today is on the National Register of Historic Places. And the Museum of the Cherokee in North Carolina opened a decade later. The Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Onamia, Minnesota, is located on Ojibwe land; but it has been a collaborative project between the band and the Minnesota Historical Society since the early 1960s and is a state historic site as well as a tribal museum . Like Mille Lacs, the Southeast Alaska Indian Cultural Center has developed a critical partnership outside of the community. The cultural 252 child center is a Tlingit nonprofit organization but is housed in a national park visitor center in Sitka after its establishment in 1969. The tribal museum movement has steadily grown since the early days of the 1960s and 1970s—a crucial era when Indigenous leaders, activists , and intellectuals demanded change in historical narratives and when the first departments of American Indian studies organized in American universities. Now a whole generation has grown up with these ideas, and some have devoted careers to writing our own versions of history, telling our own stories in museum exhibits, for reasons important to our families , communities, and tribal nations. The tribal museum has flourished in that milieu. The second wave of tribal museums, including the Makah Cultural and Research Center on the Olympic Peninsula, opened in 1979 in the aftermath of the excavation of the remarkable archaeological site of Ozette. The Seneca-Iroquois National Museum in Salamanca, New York, dates from 1977; and the Yakama Nation Cultural Heritage Center in Toppenish, Washington, opened in 1980. The most recent wave of tribal museums has grown because of the impetus provided by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. The material benefits made possible by gaming have also played a significant role, the most prominent example of this being the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut, whose tribal museum and research center is a 308,000-square-foot complex that consists of a gallery, classrooms , an auditorium, a library, and a children’s library, as well as storage and conservation facilities. Tribal museums share some of the same objectives as conventional museums , such as public history education; but the practice for which they are celebrated, extensive community involvement and collaboration, helps reproduce tribal values within the museum setting. Today we have well over one hundred of these institutions in the United States and Canada, and new tribal museums open every year. Tribal museums have been an important site of collaboration, one that has successfully engaged a new generation of tribal leaders and Indigenous intellectuals. Brian Vallo, the former lieutenant governor of the Pueblo of Acoma and director of the Historic Preservation Office, was the founding director of the Sky City Cultural Center and Haak’u Museum, which opened in 2006. Vallo always emphasizes the importance of the seventy-nine Part 3 Introduction 253 focus groups they held at Acoma to develop the new museum, some of which included children, artists, elders, and spiritual leaders from the community. The meetings were crucial to every aspect of the museum, including the design, which incorporates historic pueblo architecture but...