Product Description: Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. In Decolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the complexities of these new relationships with an eye toward exploring how museums can grapple with centuries of unresolved trauma as they tell the stories of Native peoples...read more

Product Description: The first American national museum designed and run by indigenous peoples, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC opened in 2004. It represents both the United States as a singular nation and the myriad indigenous nations within its borders...read more

Product Description: Taxidermy-the preservation, stuffing, and mounting of animal skins for lifelike display-has been traced back over four centuries to imperial Europe. In the intervening centuries it has remained inextricably linked to the politics of colonial conquest, materializing Western fantasies of mastery over the natural world and control of unruly, “wild” bodies...read more

Product Description: During the twentieth century, American Indians across North America organized protests against traditional museum treatment of Native materials and the Native community. In response, museums began to change their methods. Spirited Encounters provides a foundation for understanding museums, examines how museums collect Native materials, and explores protest as a fully American process of addressing grievances...read more

Product Description: During the twentieth century, dozens of protests, large and small, occurred across North America as American Indians asserted their anger and displayed their disappointment regarding traditional museum behaviors. In response, due to public embarrassment and an awakening of sensitivities, museums began to change their methods and, additionally, laws were enacted in support of American Indian requests for change...read more

Across North America, hundreds of reconstructed “living history” sites, which traditionally presented history from a primarily European perspective, have hired Native staff in an attempt to communicate a broader view of the past. Playing Ourselves explores this major shift in representation, using detailed observations of five historic sites in the U.S. and Canada to both discuss the theoretical aspects of Native cultural performance and advise interpreters and their managers on how to more effectively present an inclusive history.Drawing on anthropology, history, cultural performance, cross-cultural encounters, material culture theory, and public history, author Laura Peers examines “living history” sites as locations of cultural performance where core beliefs about society, cross-cultural relationships, and history are performed. In the process, she emphasizes how choices made in the communication of history can both challenge these core beliefs about the past and improve cross-cultural relations in the present.

Product Description: The following narrative can be regarded as an ethnography. I recorded data encompassing a thirteen-year period (1977-1990) as a participant-observer while serving as Director (and then Director and President) of the Museum of the American Indian-Heye Foundation (MAI)...read more

Product Description: The field of Native American art history, and our idea of what comprises Indian art itself, were molded largely by policies of the museums and institutions that established their ethnological collections in the second half of the nineteenth century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)