Content area
Full text
What is a museum and what is the significance of building and curating such institutions for the purpose of exhibiting Indigenous art? Regardless of whether a given Indigenous people has a word for art in its language, not to mention museum, like other colonial institutions, museums have become a part of the Indigenous experience in North America. So much so, that at a 2022 symposium organized at the Heard Museum, there were two days full of panels about "Remembering the Future," in which there was a panel focused on the "museum of the future," as opposed to an Indigenous future without museums.1 In fact, the museumification of Indian Country is at a point today when it is common for Indigenous nations, especially in the United States, to maintain their own museums on tribal lands-sometimes state-of-the-art, often modest.2 Yet, how often, outside of the rarified spaces of museums- and academia-do Indigenous peoples stop to reflect critically on this part of their colonial heritage?3 Indigenous peoples across the Western Hemisphere were largely unaware of the institutions that sought to "collect" their heritage items, from everyday utensils to elaborate ceremonial paraphernalia, into the warehouses, archives, and galleries that made up European and American museums, such as the Smithsonian, which sponsored dozens of Bureau of American Ethnology reports going back to 1879.4 In essence, the museums in question here are a modern innovation of the Western imagination, arising concomitantly with its colonial empires. Whatever the historical origin of the museum, or its mission, or how much has changed over the past two centuries, the museum as an idea is non-Indigenous, yet has become an integral part of the vernacular of Indigenous arts. As for museums' colonial heritage, the practice of collecting Indigenous specimens, artifacts, and images goes back to the early sixteenth century, the threshold of the Age of Enlightenment. In which case, is the decolonization of a colonial institution possible? Such is the conundrum created by settler-colonial institutions on Indian lands. On this issue, Amy Lonetree cites Cree scholar Winona Wheeler:
Decolonization entails developing a critical consciousness about the cause(s) of our oppression, the distortion of history, our own collaboration, and the degree to which we have internalized colonialist ideas and practices. Decolonization requires auto-criticism, self-reflection, and a...