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

Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 116 ERIC S. ZIMMER Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums by Amy Lonetree University of North Carolina Press, 2012 AMY LONETREE’S Decolonizing Museums offers an innovative and provocative look at three American Indian–focused museums: the Mille Lacs Indian Museum (MLIM) in Minnesota, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan. She has extensive experience working and/or researching at each but selected the sites because they “embody important ideological shifts in contemporary museum practices” (2). Lonetree demonstrates that museums can and must be “places that matter” in the broader movements toward Indigenous self-determination and cultural sovereignty. Contrasting these three institutions offers a useful case study for understanding the past, present, and future of Native-centered museums (174). The concept of “decolonizing museum practice,” which “involve[s] assisting [Indigenous] communities in addressing the legacies of historical unresolved grief,” rests at the core of Lonetree’s work (5). Decolonization qualitatively improves individual attendees’ experiences and the general tenor of Indigenous issues in America. These efforts play salient roles as tribes increasingly involve themselves in the repatriation of Indigenous remains, advocate for truth telling about the genocidal policies of American colonialism, and reassert Native worldviews and political rights to popular audiences. The Introduction provides historical background for the recent call to decolonize museum practice. It offers an excellent overview of Indigenous museum representations since the late nineteenth century and concisely describes how generations of (usually non-Native) collectors amassed Indigenous artifacts and remains to capture the final vestiges of what they considered “vanishing” cultures. These items sat on display for decades, often in exhibits that reinforced colonial master narratives of Anglo-American supremacy . Lonetree notes how anthropologists and others dehumanized the objects with constant prodding and examination in collections rooms. But the situation has improved significantly: In recent decades, museums unprecedentedly integrated Indigenous perspectives and voices into displays and exhibitions. Furthermore, collaborations between tribes and non-Native organizations have expanded and improved since self-determination began NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 117 in the 1970s. Today, many tribes independently operate museums and cultural centers where they shape representations of Native peoples and their history, and thus enhance the accountability such museums hold to their host communities (4). Lonetree substantiates her arguments with rich archival research, interviews with museum professionals and attendees, and on-site participant observation to tell the stories of the MLIM, the NMAI, and the Ziibiwing Center and to critique the quality, form, and overall impact presented by their exhibits. She devotes a full chapter to each, assessing the divergent ways through which the museums approach the challenge of decolonization. Each facility does so, but to varying degrees of success. Lonetree calls the MLIM a “hybrid” tribal museum, applauding the obviously collaborative relationship between the Ojibwe people and the Minnesota Historical Society in the museum ’s development and administration. The tribe plays a lead role in shaping public perceptions of their past, making their museum “a significant site of Indigenous self-representation” that successfully “translates new museum theory into practice” (26). In her third chapter, Lonetree takes a similarly laudatory tone toward those who advocated for and then established America’s first national space for the recognition of the Native past: the NMAI. But the discussion quickly turns critical and Lonetree admonishes the NMAI for its failure to clearly represent the U.S. government’s genocidal policies toward Indigenous peoples. Moreover, she avers that NMAI planners conflated Indigenous concepts of history with a postmodernist take on exhibit presentation, ultimately confusing public audiences. These central critiques lead Lonetree to question scholarly notions that the NMAI is a truly “decolonizing museum,” instead calling it “very much an institution of the nation-state” that implicitly reifies colonial narratives (26). Her penultimate chapter focuses on the Ziibiwing Center, the facility that, according to Lonetree, best embodies the goals of decolonization. It successfully uses state-of-the-art museum techniques to convey history through an Indigenous lens and “tell[s] the hard truths of colonization” while simultaneously developing a “vitality and community connectedness that energize[s] their ongoing...