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

For museums that hold Native American archaeological and historical collections, the poetics and politics of Native representations, particularly in museum exhibitions, have engendered widespread attention in the museum field since the 1980s. Collaborative exhibition development models are now nearly compulsory for museums that traffic in cultural representations. Collaboration takes different forms according to the project, site, and local politics, but the general gloss refers to the presence of Native consultants who have both cultural knowledge and the social capital to mediate the dissemination of cultural knowledge between their community and a non-Native public. For museums, collaboration has chiefly been associated with the inclusion of Native “voice” in exhibitions and the transfer of curatorial authority to members of the tribal communities whose stories, objects, and histories will be on display.

Anthropologist Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk), a Native American museum professional and scholar, presents three in-depth examples of museum exhibition development projects that used collaborative models: the Minnesota Historical Society and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, the National Museum of American Indian (nmai), and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways. Her retelling and analyses of these exhibition development projects reveal how the historical and social context of each institution and community affect the negotiations of making representations. She demonstrates that the tenets of a collaborative model—Native voice, curatorial authority—are shaped by the context of the site as well as by the experience and skills of the participants: museum professionals and community members. Most critically, Lonetree demonstrates that while collaboration can lead to the transfer of authority with regard to the manner in which the final representations find form, it may do so at the expense of the efficacy of the museum exhibition as a decolonizing apparatus.

Lonetree’s position is that collaboration cannot be equated with the decolonization of museum spaces and institutions. She argues that decolonization of museums is necessary to heal the historical trauma of both past and ongoing colonization of Native American peoples. Since the museum as an institution is bound up in the history of colonization, a project that seeks to dispossess, appropriate, and assimilate Indigenous land, knowledge, people, histories, and objects, museums “can be very painful sites for Native peoples” (1). Decolonization of the museum is achieved through “assist[ing] communities in their efforts to address the legacies of historical unresolved grief by speaking the hard truths of colonialism and thereby creating spaces for healing and understanding” (5). The work of Native scholar Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and her colleagues informs Lonetree’s approach to decolonization, which centers on truth telling and community healing as ways of addressing colonial legacies. The application of this scholarship allows Lonetree to develop a perspective that critiques and informs museum and source community collaborations. The articulation of a decolonizing framework as applied to the exhibition development process deserves consideration and discussion by museum professionals who encounter the politics of representation in their own practice.

For each case, the exhibit development process and its product are described through field notes (where Lonetree participated in the project’s development), interviews, texts from grant applications and assessments, and exhibit walk-throughs and labels. This work seeks to assess how well the implementation of a collaborative exhibition development process and its products function to decolonize the museum space. One of the areas Lonetree explores in the Mille Lacs Indian Museum case is the extent to which the exhibit developers, in collaboration with tribal members, addressed the colonial history of the museum’s site and object collection. In Lonetree’s assessment, the museum does not include a Native perspective in the section that deals with the colonial history of the site, a former trading post, or the object collection, Ojibwe objects collected by the traders. As many museum collections of Native American objects have a colonial collecting history, this is a critical issue...