Mediating Knowledges: Origins of a Zuni Tribal Museum (review)

Mediating Knowledges: Origins of a Zuni Tribal Museum by Gwyneira Isaac, an assistant professor of anthropology and director of the Museum Studies Program at Arizona State University, is a perfect book to be reviewed in Collaborative Anthropologies. It is a best practices example of a successful collaborative research process between a native community and a young anthropologist who really knows how to listen to what community members tell her, how to center and integrate their desires throughout her study (not simply place it in a single chapter), and how to honor their restrictions. It is contemporary yet classic ethnography based on long-term fieldwork at its best. It is also exemplary because it shows the respect Isaac has for the Zuni community and their research interests and testifies to the Zunis' respect for her and her research concerns.

The collaborative nature of the project can be seen in the fact that Isaac had distinct research goals of her own stemming from her family background (growing up in an anthropological family whose lives centered on university museums); her interest in what is now being called materiality, knowledge production, and museology; the lingering effects of past anthropological practices and relations with native communities; and her commitment to decolonizing research topics, theories, and methodologies by centering indigenous epistemologies as the paradigmatic heart of her study. To readers in American Indian studies, Native studies, and indigenous studies who have long used and advocated such an approach, Mediating Knowledges documents how community-based, participatory cultural research should be done.

Tribal museums have for many years been an intellectual and practical topic of academic and community debate as Native communities strive to conceptualize and build culturally relevant institutions that will help them maintain their heritage and language for future generations. Much of the extant literature has dealt with the founding and politics of the National Museum of the American Indian, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and intellectual property rights; how indigenous peoples have felt about Euro-American museums (often conceptualized and stereotyped static places where photographs, documents, and objects are not always interpreted or stored correctly using culturally specific principles); representational issues; and power. This growing literature has challenged standard concepts about the idea of the museum as an institution that collects, researches, stores, and displays objects for the edification and education of the public. New concepts, like the ecomuseum idea, have been developed from the ground up, producing a rich debate on what museums should be and should do as community-based and societal-based institutions. What Isaac has done in this book is to show how the Zuni community debated these issues over a number of years, how the internal debate worked (and was often contested), and how The People came to subsume the idea of a museum under the idea of a cultural and heritage center conceptualized as a place of activity, a location where culture in action can occur, not simply where culture can be seen.

Isaac begins her book with a description of Zuni as a place of social, cultural, and intellectual engagement and then describes how she slowly learned to see and think like a Zuni community member would; in short, how the Zuni came to see museums both as a resource for preserving and telling historical knowledge and as a site in which to interrogate past practices of Euro-American scholars and scientists. Such a personalized encounter helps the reader understand how Isaac positioned herself in the community and slowly gained people's trust and confidence. It also shows how she began to alter her thinking and revise her initial research questions and interests as she came to see what was truly important about her research project: examining people's expectations about how their system of knowledge operates, rather than simply asking what kind of museum could work in Zuni and what kinds of knowledge could be shared with non-Zunis. In the...