Competing Discourses, Developing Partnerships: Navigating Differences Between Ethnographic Museums and Tribal Museums

Though considerably more liberal than 20 years ago, museological practices common in ethnographic museums transnationally still point to their colonial origins and reinscribe dominant ideologies of Euro-American institutional superiority. By analyzing U.S. and German ethnographic museum discourses through the practices they employ in Native North American exhibitions, I explore how a particular setting (the museum) can be used to make a larger argument about the acknowledgement (or lack thereof) of tribal sovereignty that extends beyond North America, entering a global context. I argue that there are five practices ethnographic museums use that reify Euro-American institutional superiority. The practice of (1) evaluating American Indian art in relation to Euro-American ideals of Indianness reinforces Euro-centric standards. Audience attention is drawn to these standards of Indianness through the museum’s (2) reliance on the authority of three-dimensional objects. An artifact’s authenticity, from which it gains its representational authority, is often instantiated through claims of being the oldest, best preserved, or rarest artifact in existence. The uniqueness of objects (i.e. age, preservation, rarity) in turn establishes the importance and status of the museum that collected and preserved the artifacts. Seldom do museums speak openly about collecting practices, which continue to include (3) a reluctance to release control over or ownership of items of significance. The lack of transparency in their own collecting practices speaks to the museum’s desire to maintain authority over ethnographic content, even while neoliberal practices promote collaborations with American Indian experts. However, these American Indian experts are (4) vetted to ensure the expertise of the American Indian is complementary but not overlapping with the expertise of the curator. The curator’s expertise lies in the content of the exhibition, displayed through the labels they write that (5) often erase colonial actors from Native North American history. Specifically, labels narrate certain eras or topics as isolated events that happened to American Indians and First Nations, as if the event itself was the actor, in an effort to shield normative museum audiences from being co-opted into the role of perpetrator. These practices contradict the work that tribal museums, owned and operated by the tribal nation on display, are doing to represent themselves. The overall goal of tribal self-determination, as it is constituted through tribal museums, is to develop and employ tribally specific representational practices instead of relying on Euro-American museum standards and practices. These practices include: employing standards for tribal membership when acquiring art and artifacts for the collections, framing information presented in exhibitions in relation to their own normative audiences (tribal citizens), and presenting their institutions as authoritative on not only their own tribal history or culture, but also American Indian historical periods (e.g. the Boarding School era). These practices are tribally specific and dynamic pointing to the flexibility of tribal sovereignty, the enactment of which depends on a tribes resources, values, and community needs. By comparing the museum practices employed by ethnographic museums transnationally (in the U.S. and Germany) with the changes to museological practice in tribal museums, I seek to explore a larger empirical question. In what ways has a global neocolonialism circumvented and at times disregarded the flexible sovereignty of tribal nations in favor of outdated, exclusionary practices in ethnographic museums?PhDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138528/1/ccottre_1.pd