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Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums By Amy Lonetree. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. xxi + 219 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Decolonizing the museum has become common rhetoric in museum anthropology, but what it entails is not always dear. Amy Lonetree 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...