Introducing Partnered Collaboration into a Native American Gallery Renewal Project in a State Museum

Abstract

It is August 2007, and I am sitting a few rows up and to the side in a partially darkened auditorium, looking down on a rectangle of folding tables. Beside and behind me are perhaps a hundred museum staff members. Around the tables, men and women in business attire gather, arranging folders, notepads, and laptops. Two fiddle with the PowerPoint projector, while others wait, sitting quietly, or whispering to a neighbor. The meeting is called to order, introductions made, the printed agenda handed around, and protocols for commenting are laid out. With the two teams now facing each other, presentations by the contracted design firm begin, with points raised by and clarified for the museum team in between. Today's presentations explain the firm's general design plans, their own team leaders' duties and deadlines for exhibit content development and design production, and preparatory assignments and deadlines for Museum staff in its anthropology and history sections for their respective content development deadlines.

Decolonizing Museums: Toward a Paradigm Shift

“…For example, in a report in 1972, the National Indian Brotherhood (now the Assembly of First Nations) called for decolonizing education and including Indigenous ways of knowing and being in education. In 1969, Vine Deloria, Jr., published the landmark Custer Died For Your Sins, calling out anthropology for its transgressions in the treatment of Native Americans (Deloria 1969). Still, change was happening only sporadically.…”