Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums by Amy Lonetree (review)

Decolonizing the museum has become common rhetoric in museum anthropology, but what it entails is not always clear. Amy Lone-tree provides a lucid, direct, and cogent argument for what the criteria should be for a museum to be considered decolonized: beyond merely collaborating with indigenous peoples, a museum must tell the “hard truths” of colonialism and provide a “healing space” for people to reflect and recover from the experience. The greatest contribution of Lonetree’s book is that she not only critiques specific museums to illustrate her argument, but she also provides an example of success.

In the central three chapters, Lonetree provides narrative walk-throughs and reviews of three museums: the Mille Lacs Indian Museum, a “hybrid tribal museum” created in collaboration with the Minnesota Historical Society; the National Museum of the American Indian (nmai) in Washington dc; and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan. The scholar celebrates the achievements of the Mille Lacs Indian Museum, including that it was a collaborative project that privileges the voices of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and emphasizes their sovereignty and continuity. However, it is not a decolonized museum in Lonetree’s estimation due to the state’s financial and administrative control over the museum and its lack of display about colonialism and its effects. For example, it does not include reflections on the museum’s earlier incarnations as a trading post since 1919 and the exploitation of the Mille Lacs’ knowledge and material culture for profit. Similarly, Lonetree praises the collaborative process of making the nmai’s 2004 inaugural exhibitions and concludes that the exhibitions were nuanced and effective, but she suggests the museum failed to sufficiently “provide the fundamental context for survival” (110)—the story of colonization and genocide in the Americas.

In contrast, Lonetree considers the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways a successful decolonized museum. Opened in 2004, this tribally developed and controlled museum “does not shy away from telling the difficult stories of land theft, disease, poverty, violence and forced conversion at the hands of Christian missionaries. Its unflinching treatment of colonization provides the context that makes the survival of Saginaw Chippewa so amazing and worthy of celebration” (133).

After a section on the effects of colonialism, the museum provides a reflective space that displays beautiful objects, conveying that “even through the darkest and most painful period in their modern history, the Saginaw Chippewa’s ancestors managed to create works of great beauty” (143).

In her conclusion, Lonetree remains hopeful that, through decolonizing and indigenizing, museums can transform from “sites of colonial harm into sites of healing, and restoring community well-being” and “from sites of oppression … into sites of revitalization and autonomy” (173). Through her analysis, Lonetree provides specific prescriptions to do so. As a result, this book is an essential source for museum practitioners, both Native and non-Native. It is also important reading for scholars and undergraduate and graduate students in Native American and Indigenous studies, anthropology, museum studies, and ethnic studies.