Balance

Museum exhibitions, especially those focused on the art and material culture of Indigenous peoples, require delicate balances across a variety of spectrums, especially between tough histories and celebrations of contemporary peoples, and between art and history.

It is important to tell the uncomfortable truths of colonial histories, following the evergreen advice that “those who do not learn the past are doomed to repeat it.” In my work, I don’t shy from honesty about the devastation of colonialism, both historic and ongoing. Nothing can change if we refuse to acknowledge our past. However, I also work to celebrate living peoples. Contemporary Native American art is a complex, thriving field, and far too many Americans are ignorant of it. Consider the below statistics:

• 78 percent of Americans said they know little to nothing about Native Americans.
• 87 percent of schools don’t teach about Native peoples past 1900.
• 95 percent of images that appear in internet searches of “Native Americans” are antiquated, pre-1900 portrayals of Native peoples.¹

Exhibitions that exclusively feature historic arts perpetuate the idea that Native American culture is a thing of the past. While I have and continue to curate exhibitions of historic arts and draw from historic collections, I am excited about opportunities to work with contemporary art. When I do curate historic arts, I ensure that I work with culture bearers from the communities represented, out of respect for the cultural sovereignty of those communities and so that museum visitors understand that these communities continue to thrive.

Cultural Specificity and Protocol

In my work, I try to be as culturally specific as possible. I find that focused exhibitions on particular communities provide more thoughtful, sustained inquiry than attempts at large group exhibitions. I am particularly interested in connections between historic arts and contemporary works, and I find that these trajectories are easier to trace within specified communities. However, I recognize that group exhibitions certainly have their role, especially when centered around cross-cultural themes.

I find that generalizations always lead to offensive connotations sooner or later. A good example of this idea is the term used to describe people Indigenous to the United States. There are currently ² 574 federally-recognized American Indian tribes and Alaska Native entities in the United States, as well as numerous state-recognized tribes. Any attempt to describe the wealth of cultural diversity represented in such a large group will inevitably fall short and feel insensitive after a time. Just within the last few decades, it was common to refer to this group as “American Indian,” as in “the American Indian Movement” or “the National Museum of the American Indian,” and this is still the term used in many governmental contexts. However, this fell out of fashion as a colonial term that reinforces the Euro-American myth of Columbus having “discovered” the Americas while looking for a route to India. Instead, the term Native American became common, and is still used today. My own title at the Shelburne Museum is Associate Curator of Native American Art. However, the field has recently shifted towards the term Indigenous, because the idea of Native “Americans” reflects the imposed, colonial borders of the United States that do not map onto Indigenous lands and territories. The term Indigenous allows us to draw connections to groups across territories.

Another example of the importance of specificity is found in my dissertation project, Clay Kin: A Transhistorical Study of Pueblo Pottery and Third Gender Identities.³ The project looks at historic kikwimu and lhamana, (gender roles from Zuni and Acoma/Laguna Pueblos, respectively), as well as contemporary Pueblo potters who draw on the legacy of kikwimu and lhamana makers. When I began the project, I assumed that I would make use of the term “Two-Spirit,” a generalization developed by anthropologists in the 1990s to refer to a variety of genders and sexualities among Indigenous communities. While the term erases the specificity of particular identities like kikwimu and lhamana, it allows us to discuss the Euro-American response to these identities as a whole and to trace connections between historic identities that have been suppressed by colonization and contemporary identities. However, over the course of my research, I learned just how inappropriate the term was for my project. In particular, the Hopi-Tewa artist and activist Ed Kabotie told me that the term has connotations of witchcraft in the Hopi language. As such, I worked to remain specific when possible (writing what is perhaps the first sustained scholarly study of singular Indigenous gender identities) and used the term third-gender when I absolutely needed to be general.

Cultural specificity, aside from minimizing the potential for offense that comes from generalizations, also works to facilitate my dedication to following cultural protocol in all aspects of my work. When working in museum collections and archives, it is inevitable that one discovers sensitive material, often of a ceremonial nature. This material was often collected by non-Natives, but was sometimes contributed to by Indigenous individuals who felt that the urgency of protecting their culture in the face of assimilation and colonization superseded cultural protocols involving secrecy or specified modes of object handling and storage. On multiple occasions, I have come across items which a historic community member allowed non-Natives to view, research, or exhibit, but which contemporary community leaders would like restricted. In these instances, I understand that my responsibility is to living community members, to prevent the further perpetuation of harm. To that end, I consult with relevant culture bearers on all exhibition and research projects and follow all suggested cultural protocol.

Intentional Design

“I could hear the pottery breathing”

– Museum visitor comment

I am dedicated to exhibition design that encapsulates the thesis of the exhibition, as well as the values of the curator, institution, and collaborative partners. As an example, in Built from the Earth, the group of Pueblo consultants that I worked with asked us not to include vitrines over historic ceramic works. This decision coincided with my own years of research on the intersection of material culture studies theories of object agency with Pueblo conceptions of clay as an ancestor or living being. In removing the vitrines, the pottery was allowed to breathe and occupy space with the visitor. One note left in the gallery comment book expressed that the author “could hear the pottery breathing” – demonstrating an understanding of complex and theoretical ideas that were not expressed in the written labels. Both museum visitors and gallery guides made frequent comments on the connection they felt to the pottery without the imposition of vitrines.

Exhibitions that can express meaningful ideas without relying on written labels are inherently more inclusive to visitors. The deeply researched and important elements of exhibitions should not be withheld from visitors who read in other languages, struggle to read because of attention or learning disorders, cannot see the labels well, or just do not have the inclination to read during a social-educational experience.

1. Stolen Land, Stolen Bodies, and Stolen Stories by Crystal EchoHawk ↩︎
2. Last checked December 2023 via U.S. Department of the Interior ↩︎
3. Dissertation available upon request. Email me! ↩︎