decolonization – American Alliance of Museums

“Decolonizing is Literally Unsettling”: Repatriation of Nonprofit Land and Assets

By Elizabeth Merritt

On July 16, 2020, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF) and the Yale Union (YU) announced that YU would transfer its land and building in Portland, Oregon, to NACF. The historic building will become the headquarters of the NACF …
Building True, Lasting Collaborations with Source Communities

By Meredith Schweitzer

It’s well-documented by this point: museums are changing. No longer solely repositories of information and keepers of culturally important artifacts, museums today are taking on new roles and shaping revised definitions of …
Chris Newell: First Wabanaki Leader of the Abbe Museum

By Elizabeth Merritt

Ian Elsner describes Museum Archipelago (@museum_go on Twitter) as “a tiny podcast guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums.” As a devoted follower of the podcast, I was delighted when Ian recently interviewed Chris Newell, the …
Museopunks Episode 41: Digitization is not neutral

By Suse Anderson and Ed Rodley

Over the past decade, museums have increasingly shared high-resolution open access images of their collections. Yet there are significant legal and ethical complexities related to digital cultural heritage, particularly when blanket …
Two Case Studies in Decolonization

By Daryl Jorgenson & Mae Sevedge

In this series of posts, EdCom’s Trends Committee is taking a deeper look at emerging phenomena identified in the most recent edition of TrendsWatch from the Center for the Future of Museums. In this post, they explore how the push for …
Decolonizing the Future: museums as agents of generational equity

By Elizabeth Merritt

“We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, nuclear waste and public debt, and that we feel at liberty to plunder as we please.” –Roman …
Ceding Authority and Seeding Trust

By Ben Garcia, Kelly Hyberger, Brandie Macdonald, and Jaclyn Roessel

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2019 issue of Museum magazine, a benefit of AAM membership. Through a decolonizing collections practice, the San Diego Museum of Man is creating a more ethical standard for the Indigenous …
Discomfort in Learning: Museum audiences react to decolonizing practices.

By Starr Kelly, Angela Raup, Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2019 issue of Museum magazine, a benefit of AAM membership. Traditional museum models of interpretation have historically failed Indigenous people by creating static spaces where the …
Hiding In Plain Sight: An exhibition showcasing America’s obsession with Native American iconography aims to start a new conversation.

By Paul Chaat Smith

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2019 issue of Museum magazine, a benefit of AAM membership. By most standards, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, DC, is a wildly successful …
Taking Native Lands and Lives

By Christine Lashaw

Museums have power—the power to tell stories, shape narratives, and influence the lens we bring to bear on the past. That power can be harnessed for healing, as museums contribute to a reparative reexamination of history and the legacy of …