“Get to Know Your World”: An Interview with Jim Enote, Director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center in Zuni, New Mexico

Abstract

How does a tribal museum meet the needs of a community that wants a self‐contained “insider's” space while at the same time working to correct misperceptions of the culture by “outsiders”? The A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center in Zuni, New Mexico has developed a forum‐like approach in which community members explore Zuni cultural values; it also uses this method to rethink Western ideas about museums. Programming that grounds Zuni youth in their immediate cultural and geographic environment operates alongside ones designed to bridge Zuni and Western knowledge systems, as well as others that explore global networks of media technology as a means to reground Zuni culture, which has over the past century been distributed in museum collections around the world. Through an interview with the current director, Jim Enote, these relational dynamics between local and global values are explored, revealing the complex realities of how indigenous knowledge had been sited and how it is being resituated through these contemporary spaces and institutions.