Amy Lonetree, “Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums” (University of North Carolina, 2012)

New Books in Indigenous Studies · Nov 20, 2012 · 1h 10m

“Museums can be very painful sites for Native peoples,” writes Amy Lonetree, associate professor of history at UC-Santa Cruz and a citizen of the Ho Chunk Nation, “as they are intimately tied to the colonization process.”

Such a contention appears incongruous to most; museums are supposed to be places of wonder and learning, after all, pillars of our democratic culture. But consider the history. From the wholesale plunder of cultural artifacts and human remains — “If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up in prison,” Walter Eco-Hawk puts it, “but desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a…