The New World of the - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

The New World of the
Indigenous Museum

Philipp J. Deloria

Abstrakt: Museums have long offered simplistic representations of American Indians, even as they served
as repositories for Indigenous human remains and cultural patrimony. Two critical interventions–the
founding of the National Museum of the American Indian (1989) and the passage of the Native Amer-
ican Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990)–helped transform museum practice. The decades
following this legislation saw an explosion of excellent tribal museums and an increase in tribal capacity in
both repatriation and cultural affairs. As the National Museum of the American Indian refreshes its per-
manent galleries over the next five years, it will explicitly argue for Native people’s centrality in the Amer-
ican story, and insist not only on survival narratives, but also on Indigenous futurity.

When Indigenous visitors from across the country

and the world come to Washington, D.C., they often
head for the Smithsonian National Museum of the
American Indian (nmai). Located on the Mall, In
close proximity to the Capitol, the distinctive build-
ing captures the curvilinear forms of the natural
world while simultaneously evoking the elaborate
perched stone cities of Southwestern cliff-dwellers.
Inside, visitors find flags from a host of tribal nations
surrounding a vast domed space, a gathering place
for local groups, national organizations, and muse-
um programming.

In the original configuration, put in place at the
museum’s opening in 2004, three permanent exhi-
bition galleries anchored the museum, along with
a theater and film documentary, two changing ex-
hibits, and the Mitsitam Café, which served Na-
tive foods from North and South America. Embed-
ded within those three large galleries were a series
of smaller spaces featuring tribally curated exhib-
its meant to explore the history and culture of indi-
vidual groups, even as the museum itself sought to

philip j. deloria, ein Fellow von
die American Academy seitdem 2015,
is Professor of History at Harvard
Universität. He is the author of
American Studies: A User’s Guide (mit
Alexander Olson, 2017), Indians in
Unexpected Places (2004), and Playing
Indian (1998) and editor of Blackwell
Companion to Native American History
(with Neal Salisbury, 2002).

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explore more general themes: Our Lives,
Our Peoples, Our Universes. On opening
day, some twenty-five thousand Indige-
nous people marched in celebration on the
Mall, welcoming the museum into being.
It was a joyous occasion, an assertion of
Native pride, presence, and survival. Was
could possibly go wrong?

Same-day negative reviews appeared
in both The New York Times and The Wash-
ington Post accusing the nmai of a lack of
scholarly rigor and haphazard exhibits
marked by vagueness and superficiality.
Disappointment and harsh words also
came from Indigenous critics, who want-
ed a more visibly confrontational politics.
Many visitors, who could not pigeonhole
the museum into a familiar category, Sei-
came disoriented: Was it an art museum
full of beautiful, well-lit aesthetic objects?
(Not really, though the lighting was often
excellent.) A history museum? (NEIN, it pre-
sented nothing like a linear history.) Ein
anthropological museum, full of “culture
areas” and representative ethnographic
Stücke? (Definitely not!)1

The nmai was (and is) a disorienting
museum. It gleefully decontextualized
ethnographic artifacts, assembling arrow-
heads, ceramic masks, and small gold pieces
into new forms, creating aesthetically ori-
ented swirls and patterns bundled together
into display cases. The small “pods” of trib-
al self-presentation interrupted and punc-
tured viewers’ efforts to find a linear argu-
ment as they moved through a gallery. And
those pods were themselves uneven: manche
focused on only a few objects, some on text-
heavy recounting of tribal history and cul-
tur, some aiming to create an experience
of Indigenous home space. Some were sim-
ply more compelling than others. Many vis-
itors wanted a recounting of a painful his-
tory, around which they could organize
viewing experiences of guilt, empathy, Und
painless redemption, before heading to the
café for quasi-exotic food. (No hamburg-

ers here; only bison burgers!) The museum
studiously avoided the tone of dispassion-
ate anthropological expertise found on so
many wall labels in other museums. In oth-
er words, it seemed to have willfully walked
away from the capital-M authority of the
Museum itself. Visitors’ confusion was the
result of an assertive Indigenous museum
practice–nonlinear and holistic–that dou-
bled down on the absence of the forms and
language of the classic Western museum.

The authority of the Museum had been a

long time in the making. Beginning in the
sixteenth century, Renaissance rulers, aris-
tocrats, merchants, and scientists assem-
bled eclectic collections of material–nat-
ural history, Kunst, religious relics, und ein-
tiquities–into what we commonly refer
to as “cabinets of curiosities.” These cab-
inets–sometimes a literal cabinet, but of-
ten a discrete room overstuffed with mate-
rial–served as both the venue for scholarly
study and the performative basis for claims
to knowledge, authority, and power. Der
cabinets demonstrated the commanding
reach of elites, for they often featured ob-
jects from trade routes, explorations, Und
conquests stretching across the globe. Bereits-
tive cargo from the New World and the Pa-
cific frequently made its way to such cab-
inets, marking “the Indigenous” as a key
element in an Enlightenment project that
married power and knowledge with Eu-
ropean imperial and colonial endeavors
around the planet.

In such cabinets, one can see the germs
of what would become long-standing
museum practices. A collection of dispa-
rate objects required categories and cata-
loging; in that process, one might create
Wissen. A collection required care; Es
became a proprietary site for new forms of
archival science and storage. A collection
required management of objects coming
in and objects going out; the arts of acces-
sion, deaccession, and provenance were

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107

147 (2) Spring 2018Philip J. Deloria

constituted and consolidated. A collec-
tion required collecting: out of the cab-
inets were borne the field agent and the
collecting expedition, a venture with no
purpose other than the acquisition of ob-
Projekte. And a collection created a vast web
of possibilities for recontextualization, für
moving objects out of one location (a util-
itarian cooking pot, zum Beispiel) and into
another (as a definitive example of Amer-
ican Indian life). The most important re-
contextualization may have centered on
the authority of collectors themselves, für
the objects constituted them as unique fig-
ures of authority.

Gleichzeitig, the cabinets–and the
more formalized museums that soon fol-
lowed–also constituted and displayed the
Indigenous as a category and object: nicht-
European, defined in light of colonial en-
counters, and primitive–either as “natu-
ral” or as “savage” in relation to the “civi-
lized.” Indigenous people and their things
were quickly incorporated into emergent
scientific discourses: natural history (Sie
were like animals), ethnology and anthro-
pology (they were “earlier” forms of hu-
man social organization), archeology (Du
found them when you started digging),
and craniology (skull comparisons might
reveal racial differences in intelligence and
Kapazität). They had cultural functions as
well. Indigenous objects had a trophy-like
quality to them, serving as evidence of past
conflict and Western military and civili-
zational superiority. Indigenous material
culture could function as a kind of fetish or
token for the claims to Indigenous lands.
In this light, it is unsurprising to find
Das, in the early United States, collecting
and cabinets took on particularly nation-
alist forms as they were gradually reshaped
into that thing we call the museum. Phil-
adelphia artist Charles Willson Peale de-
veloped a museum out of a collection of
portraits, placed on public display in his
heim. The exhibit–for we can truly name

it that and identify it as a characteristic of
museums–proved popular, and when
Peale realized he could charge admission,
he began collecting not simply art, but also
antiquities, natural history specimens, fos-
sils, and American Indian artifacts, among
other objects. His son Titian Ramsay Peale
would sign on as an artist/naturalist/col-
lector to a number of exploring expedi-
tions in the American South and West
as well as the 1838–1842 Wilkes Expedi-
tion, which explored the globe. In 1794,
the Peale Museum moved to the Ameri-
can Philosophical Society, thus constitut-
ing its authority around the nation’s first
scientific association, even as it revealed
that the museum and its things could also
serve as experiential commodities.

In New York, John Pintard’s 1791 Ameri-
can Museum featured more curiosities than
natural history specimens, and it changed
hands several times before becoming, In
1841, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, A
combination of display, freak show, amuse-
ment, theater, and zoo that proved a cen-
tral venue in the development of American
popular culture. In Virginia, Thomas Jeffer-
Sohn, likely in 1783, made the first systemat-
ic archeological investigation in the Unit-
ed Staaten, trenching and carving an Indian
burial mound on the Rivanna River, an ef-
fort that he recounted in Notes on the State
of Virginia (1785). Philadelphia physician
Samuel George Morton’s Crania Americana
(1839) based its argument–racial differenc-
es demonstrated by cranial capacity, welche
indexed intelligence–on an ever-growing
collection of human skulls. Many of these
were of Indigenous people; most were not
archeological specimens, but were pro-
cured by Army surgeons on battlefields
and by robbing graves and recent burials. In
1829, British scientist James Smithson died,
leaving his estate to the United States for the
founding of “an establishment for the in-
crease and diffusion of knowledge among
men,” thus creating the Smithsonian In-

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe New World of the Indigenous Museum

stitution, which formalized the meeting of
what we now recognize in terms of scientif-
ic research, collecting and collections man-
agement, exhibition and programming, Und
the imagined community of the nation.2

This potted history suggests only some
of the ways that American Indian people
might be incorporated into the project that
was “the museum.” They were the objects
of knowledge, rarely active subjects in its
production; others would speak about
them and occasionally for them. This dom-
inating knowledge was matched by the ac-
companying devastation of Indigenous
lands and peoples; museums and their
collections were not neutral or innocent.
They were full of Indian things. In the latter
half of the nineteenth century, for exam-
Bitte, frontier officers and doctors sent in a
steady stream of human remains from bat-
tlefields and graves (to the Army Medical
Museum, Zum Beispiel), accompanied by a
vast array of material culture that dispersed
across any number of American museums.
Founded in 1879, the Bureau of Ethnology
(später, Bureau of American Ethnology) War
created to transfer records and organize the
anthropological knowledge of the United
States under the rubric of the Smithsonian
Institution. It housed information from the
great geographical surveys of the 1870s and
established its own fieldwork and collect-
ing programs. The Bureau’s first effort–
Die 1879 Stevenson expedition to the Zuni
Pueblo–acquired thousands of items, ein-
choring a collection that would eventual-
ly surpass ten thousand objects, all taken
from a single location!3 By the early twenti-
eth century, as historian Douglas Cole and
others have documented, the long-held be-
lief that Indigenous cultures were “vanish-
ing” led to a rush of collection activity and
the establishment of major museum collec-
tions in New York, Chicago, Denver, Und
elsewhere.

Those museums established expecta-
tions for Indians: Native peoples were

vanished, racially and socially primitive,
voiceless, and spoken for by knowledge-
able authorities. Their material traces were
commonly organized around three cate-
gories: American history, in which they
made a quick appearance and then disap-
peared; anthropology, in which they illus-
trated social evolution or, at best, cultur-
al relativism; or art, in which their objects
were recontextualized around form more
than function, and in which they served as
a primitivist foil for American and Euro-
pean modernism.

Museums have exploded in number and

popularity over the last century, and Indi-
an people have sought to undo these his-
tories, contesting the politics of museum
representation and demanding the repa-
triation of human remains and materi-
al culture taken during the rush to build
collections. In 1978, the Zuni people peti-
tioned the Denver Art Museum for the re-
turn of the Ahayu:da, commonly referred to
as “war gods”: das ist, carved poles placed
around the Zuni homeland and meant, In
a sacred process, to deteriorate over time.
It was the first episode in a long struggle
to repatriate, from museums and collec-
tors, scores of Ahayu:da, as well as oth-
er objects of cultural patrimony. Around
die selbe Zeit, tribal people, led by Indi-
an veterans, began drawing parallels to the
extraordinary efforts of veterans’ groups
and the United States to repatriate hu-
man remains from Vietnam. They noted
the large number of Indian war dead that
were shamefully acquired and finding no
rest in American museum collections.4

Repatriation–which would be formal-
ized in the 1990 Native American Graves
Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra)
–was first articulated as policy a year ear-
lier, im 1989 act that created the Na-
tional Museum of the American Indian.
Mit anderen Worten, while nagpra would es-
tablish a process used by tribes and mu-

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109

147 (2) Spring 2018Philip J. Deloria

seums to reconsider past practices of col-
lecting that lived on in various collections
across the country, the critical precedent
was the creation of the nmai, which was
dedicated “exclusively to the history and
art of cultures Indigenous to the Ameri-
cas.”5 The nmai enabling act rests on four
arguments: Erste, that there was no nation-
al voice or clearinghouse for American In-
dian perspectives on the role of the Indige-
nous in American history and life; zweite,
that the acquisition of the Heye Museum
of the American Indian in New York City
offered an opportunity to create a national
museum on the basis of an already-strong
Sammlung; dritte, that a site was available
on the National Mall, and was designated
for the use of the Smithsonian; and final-
ly, that a national museum would enable
and support a program of repatriation. Der
act states:

(6) by order of the Surgeon General of the
Army, etwa 4,000 Indian human
remains from battlefields and burial sites
were sent to the Army Medical Museum
and were later transferred to the Smithso-
nian Institution;

(7) through archaeological excavations, In-
dividual donations, and museum donations,
the Smithsonian Institution has acquired ap-
proximately 14,000 additional Indian hu-
man remains;

(8) the human remains referred to in para-
graphs (6) Und (7) have long been a matter
of concern for many Indian tribes, inkl-
ing Alaska Native Villages, and Native Ha-
waiian communities which are determined
to provide an appropriate resting place for
their ancestors;

(9) identification of the origins of such hu-
man remains is essential to addressing that
concern.6

The nmai came into existence–from
a Native American perspective–to repair
and reconcile a long and painful history of

relations between Indian people and Amer-
ican museums. And that history was not
only defined by grotesque practices of col-
lecting. Representations of Indian people
in American museums had long reinforced
deep ideological formations about Indian
disappearance, savagery, and exoticism. Als
Indigenous studies scholar Jean O’Brien has
demonstrated, one of the most important
vectors for “vanishing” (as an active verb)
Indians was the local historical society.7 In
countless small museums, the local and re-
gional histories of Indians were framed in
terms of their disappearance, which made
for a harmless, curious prehistory of the
White settlement of towns and counties.
Manchmal, these frames included ges-
tures toward past violence, framing his-
torical narratives usually based on a kind
of innate Indian aggression. A “defensive”
victory over such Indians not infrequent-
ly rooted the local origin myth. Often such
museums did not hesitate to display Indian
remains. In Illinois, Zum Beispiel, a local chi-
ropractor named Don Dickson began exca-
vating mounds in the 1920s, eventually un-
Abdeckung 237 Indian skeletons. Rather than
removing them from the ground, howev-
er, Dickson removed the dirt and covered
the site with a building, creating a kind of
“dig” museum that exposed an entire Indi-
an cemetery to visitors. Faced with substan-
tial and ongoing Indian protest, and in the
wake of nagpra, the state closed down the
private museum in 1992, entombing the re-
mains in limestone and building a new mu-
seum on the site.

Larger museums with bigger budgets
created life displays, arranging their mate-
rial culture artifacts on manikins and pos-
ing them in family groupings. The diorama
proved a favorite mechanism for placing
Indians in the context of precontact “life-
ways” displays that linked subsistence, Also-
cial life, and culture firmly in the past. Bei
the University of Michigan museum, für
Beispiel, the single most popular display

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe New World of the Indigenous Museum

for decades was a collection of miniature
dioramas, remembered by generations of
locals who first saw them on school-spon-
sored field trips. The dioramas were com-
pelling: they were beautifully made, fasci-
nating acts of human craft. But there was
also something magical about tiny, prim-
itive people encased in small transparent
boxes. And for fifth-grade boys, the “ac-
curate” representation of bare breasts put
a touch of the erotic on top of the exotic.
Ann Arbor residents loved the dioramas;
Native American students, faculty, and vis-
itors did not. At Chicago’s Field Museum,
the Hopi diorama contained life casts of
real people who were recognizable to oth-
er Hopis as family members and friends.
These histories of display and represen-
tation bring us back to 2004 and the mixed
receptions to the first iteration of the Na-
tional Museum of the American Indian.
Non-Native audiences came to the beauti-
ful new building with a firm set of expecta-
tions about what they would see, all part of
these long and familiar traditions of Amer-
ican museology: there would be sad, nos-
talgic regret and a little guilt; there would
be cultural difference on display; und da
would be something about environmen-
talism and spirituality. Der (meistens) In-
dian people who consulted with Native
communities and then planned, curated,
crafted, and labeled the exhibits offered
a very different (and utterly understand-
able) message: “We are still here! Wir haben
not vanished!”

Das, in itself, made the nmai unlike oth-
er museums. But the curators were also part
of important questionings in the museum
world itself, and their exhibits–nonlinear
to the point of confusion, multivocal to the
point of uncertainty–spoke to the possi-
bilities of a postcolonial and postmodern
üben. In that sense, the museum was try-
ing not simply to repair the past, but also
to shape the future. Other museums had
made similar efforts to rethink represen-

Station. The University of British Colum-
bia Museum, Zum Beispiel, is justly recog-
nized for its “open storage” systems, In
which visitors can see not simply a few ob-
jects in tightly organized curations, Aber, Zu
a large extent, the full reach–many would
say the “overkill”–of early collecting. Der
very form of the display revealed a different
kind of history. In Paris, the Musée du Quai
Branly mounted spatially disorienting gal-
leries organized around structuralist argu-
ments in which war clubs, canoe paddles,
and money belts from Indigenous cultures
around the world demonstrated meaning-
ful affinities.

If these were some of the contexts for
the nmai, Jedoch, they were insuffi-
ciently widespread to seem familiar. Der
nmai did, in fact, prove confusing to the
average visitor, and attendance began a
slow, though not always even, decline in
the years following the opening. The non-
linear spatiality of the museum got in the
way of its message–“we are still here!”–
welche, if it was emotionally imperative for
Indian people, proved insufficient (even as
it was received) to hold the affective, intel-
lectual, and visual imagination of viewers.
At the moment of its creation, that mes-
sage was–appropriately–central to the
museum’s mission and its Native constit-
uency. Equally critical to that constituen-
cy, Jedoch, was the question of repatria-
tion. The Native American Graves Protec-
tion and Repatriation Act followed close
on the heels of the creation of the nmai,
and their respective processes developed
in close parallel to one another, to the point
that the nmai now runs more or less in
sync with nagpra.

nagpra requires federal agencies, mu-
seums, and other entities receiving feder-
al funding to prepare inventories of their
holdings across key categories–human
remains, funerary objects, cultural pat-
rimony, and sacred objects–and to con-
vey those inventories to interested tribes.

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147 (2) Spring 2018Philip J. Deloria

Holdings may be affiliated (the museum
knows the provenance of an item, inkl-
ing tribal origin) or unaffiliable (es gibt kein
way to know origin). Many items occupy
a space in between: they are not yet affil-
iated, but there are grounds to think that
they could be through a process of inves-
tigation. Tribes are able to request consul-
tations on the inventories. Typically, diese
consultations involve site visits to muse-
ums and examination of items. Following
the consultation, a tribe can prepare a claim
(the burden of proof is on the tribe, nicht
the museum); if the claim meets nagpra
Kriterien, the museum must deaccession
and repatriate the object. An appeals board
hears cases in which a tribe disputes a mu-
seum’s judgment on its claims.

In the early 1990s, as nagpra was being
implemented, museum curators and an-
thropologists feared that newly empowered
Indian people would be backing trailers up
to museum loading docks and spiriting off
vast parts of collections. They needn’t have
worried. nagpra requires a deliberative
process and does not empower Indian peo-
ple all that much. And most Native people
have complex ideas on the ways repatria-
tion might work, particularly in relation to
Objekte. I witnessed a consultation in the
mid-1990s, Zum Beispiel, in which the mu-
seum laid out on tables literally hundreds
of objects from its inventories. The tribal
consultants–a team of elders and adminis-
trators–spent a long day examining them.
A couple of things soon became apparent
to all. Erste, these people treasured the ob-
jects in the museum’s collections. Sie
greeted them, held them, and discussed
them with a kind of happy reverence. Sec-
ond, they were not reflexively hostile to
the museum as a custodial site; in the end,
they said that they planned to proceed on
a cultural patrimony claim on five or six
Artikel. Dritte, the museum, which record-
ed the discussions, gained far more from
the exchange than it ended up giving to the

tribe. The consultants offered detailed de-
scriptions of the use, meanings, and sto-
ries surrounding many of the objects, Und
curators told me later that they were eager
to fill in their databases with this prolifer-
ation of new information. Im Idealfall, as now
happens with many museums, the actual
nagpra claim takes shape in a collabora-
tive and consultative setting (though that
is of course not always the case). nagpra
has forced tribes to build a new capacity
around cultural affairs, which has, im Gegenzug,
redounded to tribal benefit. In the best cas-
es, museums have served as valuable part-
ners and supporters for tribes; in the worse
Fälle, they have been recalcitrant, obstruc-
tionist, and distrustful.

As the new flagship Smithsonian mu-
seum, the nmai has consistently sought
to take a leadership position on repatria-
tion issues. It has long hoped–and is get-
ting close–to repatriate all human remains
from its collections, demonstrating the pos-
sibilities for a humane resolution to a dif-
ficult history. The nmai has also insisted
that repatriation claim assessments rely on
the highest caliber of scholarly research;
lengthy reports offer comprehensive dis-
cussions of cultural affiliation claims, col-
lecting histories, and museum provenance.
They adhere to a rigorous interpretation of
guidelines. The museum has, at the same
Zeit, modeled ways in which repatriation
claims can serve as partnerships that are
productive for tribes. nmai repatriation
staff members have developed strong work-
ing relationships with tribal repatriation of-
ficers. These same kinds of relationships are
in reach for all museums, and many have
taken similar paths.

The nmai comprises three–or perhaps
four–museums. The original Heye Muse-
um in New York City had a loyal following,
and many insisted that it retain some pres-
ence in the City. The nmai-New York mu-
seum continues that history, exchanging
exhibits with the Washington, D.C., mu-

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe New World of the Indigenous Museum

seum. Like many Smithsonian museums,
the nmai also maintains a storage and
research site in a third museum in Suit-
Land, Maryland. In its earliest incarna-
tion, nmai leaders also insisted on a kind
of virtual “Fourth Museum,” which was
to be its tangible connections to Indian
Country. The nmai would consult on ex-
hibition topics and future collecting, train
community people to help develop shows
(and tribal pods within galleries), train in-
terns in museum practice, and send trav-
eling exhibitions across Indian Country.
The aim was not simply to host a national
museum on the Mall, but to help support
and grow a range of tribal museums across
the country.

One should not assume that the nmai
represented the first effort on the part of
Indian people to intervene in museum
Praktiken Methoden Ausübungen. The early twentieth-century
Seneca intellectual and activist Arthur C.
Parker spent his entire career as a museum
specialist. Native anthropologists such as
J. N. B. Hewitt (Tuscarora), William Jones
(Fuchs), and Ella Deloria (Dakota) found
themselves working in or with museums,
including both large institutions such as the
Smithsonian and the Field Museum in Chi-
cago as well as small ones such as the W. H.
Over Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota.
In 1931, Mohegan medicine woman and
intellectual Gladys Tantaquidgeon, along
with her father John and brother Harold,
founded the Tantaquidgeon Indian Muse-
um in Uncasville, Connecticut.

Most of the credit for tribal museums
goes to tribes, communities, and visionary
local museum leaders. The list of innova-
tiv, beautifully designed, Indigenous mu-
seums is long and getting longer: the Ta-
mastslikt Cultural Institute (Oregon), Die
Mashentucket Pequot Museum (Connecti-
cut), the Chickasaw Nation Museum (Okla-
homa), the Ziibiwing Center of Anishi-
nabe Culture and Lifeways (Michigan), Die
Southern Ute Cultural Center (Colorado),

the Acoma Sky City Cultural Center (Neu
Mexiko), and the Alaska Native Heritage
Center (Alaska), unter anderen. The Na-
tional Association of Tribal Historic Pres-
ervation Officers lists over sixty tribal mu-
seums on its website.8 Many of these, solch
as the Seminole Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum,
have state-of-the art conservation facilities;
Andere, such as the long-running and beau-
tiful Tantaquidgeon Museum, function as
less-formal structured sites of community
memory and self-representation. Many of
these institutions have staff members who
have passed through the nmai or other
tribal museums.

And of course, tribal museum profession-
als have found many other routes into mu-
seum leadership. Roberta Conner (Cayuse)
of the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute entered
the field through journalism and manage-
ment, Zum Beispiel. Hartman Lomawaima
(Hopi) went to Harvard and worked his
way through the museum world to be-
come Director of the Arizona State Mu-
seum. James Nason (Comanche) earned a
Ph.D. at the University of Washington, stay-
ing in Seattle as curator at the Burke Muse-
um. Lomawaima and Nason, unter anderen,
worked hard to foster a national organiza-
tion for tribal museums, libraries, and ar-
chives, planting seeds for today’s Associa-
tion of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Mu-
seums, incorporated in 2010.9
If “we are still here!” was the right note
for the nmai to strike in 2004, it is also the
case that permanent exhibitions are never
permanent, and audiences and tribal needs
have changed since the opening. Over the
last few years, the nmai has been replac-
ing its original galleries in an effort to look
squarely to the future and to continuing
its role in leading the museum world on
all things Indigenous. Its Nation to Na-
tion show, launched in 2014 and meant to
bridge gallery renovations, demonstriert
that future, which is based upon a contin-

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147 (2) Spring 2018Philip J. Deloria

ual insistence that one cannot know any-
thing significant about the American past
or present without foregrounding Indian
people–their treaties, in the case of Nation
to Nation–their sovereignties, und ihre
landet. The first permanent gallery reinstal-
lation, “Americans” (scheduled to open in
early 2018 ), will directly engage the history
that many visitors found lacking in 2004,
retelling the classic stories of the United
States through an Indigenous lens.

American museums with Native Amer-
ican collections–including the nmai–
have also been engaged with Indigenous
museum practice in an international con-
Text. The Australia National Museum’s larg-
est gallery is dedicated to First Australians;
local museums in Melbourne and Sydney
have collaborated with Aboriginal people in
designing exhibits that speak to their local
communities. Taiwan has an equivalent of
the nmai, a dedicated Aboriginal (prehis-
tory) museum, located in Taitung, sowie
the private Shung Ye Museum of Formosan
Aborigines, which sits directly across from
the massive Palace Museum. In Kanada, Die
outcome of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission and recent 150th Anniversary
Celebrations has created particularly visi-
ble national conversations and debates con-
cerning First Nations people and museums.
In Hokkaido, Japan, the Shiraoi Ainu Muse-
um (Porotokotan) offers both an Ainu-cen-
tered representational politics and a local
anchor for Indigenous culture and institu-
tional capacity. In Aotearoa/New Zealand,
the National Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa
in Wellington, as well as major museums
in Auckland, Christchurch, and Dunedin,
began with natural history and moved, wie
early American museums, seamlessly into
Maori ethnological collecting. The 1980s
UNS. tour of Maori arts, Te Maori, marked
a new point of engagement for New Zea-
land museums and Maori people. In 2016,
the Smithsonian repatriated fifty-four hu-
man remains through the Te Papa Museum,

as part of Karanga Aotearoa, ein Internationaler-
al repatriation effort that has returned over
four hundred human remains to New Zea-
Land. These kinds of global exchanges–and
these are only a few examples–have been
driven in part by the institutional infra-
structures made possible through big mu-
seums and in part through global Indige-
nous networks.

Tribal museums, like all museums, nicht
only document the past and educate the
present; they also reach out toward an In-
digenous future. One part of that mission
surely involves technical transformations:
new digital collections–management tools
and web access offer the opportunity for
the cultivation of new audiences; new dis-
play strategies create different kinds of
museum-going experiences; and new ex-
hibits seek to transform the old narratives
surrounding Indigenous peoples. But the
leadership of Indigenous museums goes be-
yond the technical. It returns, in the end, Zu
the thingness of things themselves. Across a
global range of traditions, Indigenous peo-
ple have consistently located power in ob-
Projekte. If the institution that is the Museum
makes any generalizable argument, it is that
its collections are more than distant objects
locked in glass cases or hidden in storage fa-
cilities. All museums aspire to be something
other than, as philosopher Theodor Adorno
once suggested, mausoleums, the homes of
no-longer vital dead objects.10

The very nature of the Indigenous muse-
um, engaged with Indigenous epistemolo-
gies, suggests in important ways the pos-
sibility that one might invest objects with
the power to return one’s gaze. In the In-
digenous museum, one is reminded–per-
haps more than elsewhere–to maintain a
relation of reciprocity between object and
viewer, to find in the institutional setting an
occasion for musing–the generation of liv-
ing, creative knowledge. The National Mu-
seum of the American Indian was confus-
ing to its first visitors, confounding them

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe New World of the Indigenous Museum

through presentations that spoke with a
strong Indigenous accent. That accent, wie
Indian people themselves, will not be going
anywhere. It speaks of histories of pain and
resistance, as it must. But it also speaks–to
all museums–of the capacity of seeming-
ly inanimate objects that are empowered to
ask us to muse: to contemplate. To become

be-mused by intellectual and ethical chal-
Längen. To become a-mused, not in the su-
perficial way we imagine amusement, aber in
a deep way that situates us as new kinds of
perceivers, thinkers, and knowers, and thus
as new and better actors in a world in which
Indigenous people continue to struggle,
survive, and prosper.

Endnoten
1 For an excellent introduction to the controversies and critiques surrounding the nmai, see Amy
Lonetree and Amanda J. Cobb, Hrsg., The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conver-
sations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). On media coverage specifically, see Aldona
Jonaitis and Janet Catherine Berlo, “‘Indian Country’ on the National Mall: The Mainstream
Press versus the National Museum of the American Indian,” in ibid., 208–240.

2 David R. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and its Audience (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Thomas Jefferson, Notes On the State of Virginia
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Samuel George Morton and
George Combe, Crania Americana: Or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations
of North and South America. To Which Is Prefixed an Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species. Illus-
trated by Seventy-Eight Plates and a Colored Map (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839); Ann Fabian, Der
Skull Collectors: Race, Wissenschaft, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010); David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native Amer-
ican Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000); and James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing
with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Masse.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

3 Sehen, Zum Beispiel, Chip Colwell, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native

America’s Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

4 T. J. Ferguson, Roger Anyon, and Edmund J. Ladd, “Repatriation at the Pueblo of Zuni:
Diverse Solutions to Complex Problems,” American Indian Quarterly 20 (2) (Frühling 1996): 251–273.
My understanding of the importance of American Indian veterans in the early discussions
surrounding repatriation comes from conversations with Suzan Shown Harjo.

5 National Museum of the American Indian Act, Pub. L. 101-185, 103 Stat. 1336, November 28, 1989.
6 Ebenda.
7 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

8 Tribal Museums & Cultural Centers, http://tribalmuseums.org/index.html.
9 Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums, http://www.atalm.org/node/27.
10 Adorno was purposefully misreading the etymologies of the words in order to advance his ar-
gument. Theodor Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shi-
erry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Masse.: The mit Press, 1977), 177. For a longer treatment
of this theme, including more specific origins in the writing of Walter Benjamin, see Philip
Deloria, “Wealth of Nations,” in Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National
Museum of the American Indian, Hrsg. Cécile Ganteaume (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 13–18.

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