Indigenizing the Institution
Heather Ahtone
First Americans Museum (FAM) opened to the public September 18, 2021, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Operated by the American Indian Cultural Center Foundation in partnership with the City of Oklahoma City and the State of Oklahoma, the project’s opening was a significant success for all involved in its planning. Building FAM required the address of challenges that had not been faced before despite the history of Native presence within museum collections and emerging Native leadership in museums across the nation. At the core of the challenges was that the museum set for its mission to create exhibitions that represent the unique diversity of stories from the thirty-nine tribal nations in Oklahoma and, unlike NMAI, is located within the community it represents. This called for an Indigenized curatorial methodology to create a framework positioning the tribal nations as authorities over their own stories and as partners in the museum’s storytelling voice. Historically, the museum field broadly has not experienced the prioritization for Native philosophy and ethos within the vision created by the leadership (including board members, director, and curators) and applied within institutional practices and policies. Additionally, as an institution that ambitioned to genuinely represent the dynamic of its constituent tribal communities, engineering exhibitions that venerate truthtelling without generating trauma porn was also a concern. These challenges compounded the evident difficulties of doing a new build construction project for a museum that had limited staff and no collections.
FAM leadership recognized that it had to overcome these barriers to operate as the institution fulfilling the vision carried by its founders. Recognizing these challenges, the leadership was organized for the final push in 2018 and worked through to resolve these barriers and forged a path that can serve as a model for others to follow. This essay is an overview of the challenges that faced FAM staff to get the museum open and what remains as we work to build an institution founded on Indigenous American philosophies, operating on an ethos that honors our ancestors, and creates a future for our First American communities through the institutional corpus of a museum.
As a brief background to FAM, it is important to note the museum’s position within the landscape to which sixty-seven tribes were forcibly removed during the ethnic cleansing of the southeastern United States in the nineteenth century as part of national expansionist policies. Thirty-eight tribal nations are located today in Oklahoma that have homelands reaching from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from the Great Lakes region in Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and everywhere between. The linguistic diversity in Oklahoma is greater than the Indigenous languages of Europe and the cultural diversity is roughly equivalent to relocating the forty-four nations of Europe into a land mass that is the equivalent of the Island of England, a portion of the United Kingdom.
One in four tribally enrolled Native Americans in the United States has their tribal citizenship recognized by a nation in Oklahoma. From this verdant environment, our families have passed on the resiliency and strength of surviving these traumatic experiences, drawing upon the wisdom of our cultural knowledge and ancestral ways of knowing how the Creator made us for the world (and vice versa), and the recognition that we can not only survive difficult times but thrive as Indigenous people. First Americans Museum was conceived as a site to bear witness to that history and the diverse cultural strength of our communities.
What laid before us was a herculean task.
Museums have not historically been sites for Indigenous American people, though we have been part of museums since the earliest installations. Our cultural materials have been included in exhibitions in the United States since Charles Willson Peale opened his museum in 1784 at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, PA. Since the beginning, the voice and authoritative presence of Indigenous people have been largely absent except in tribal museums until the early 1990s with the growing call to open a national museum. Even at that, NMAI opened with a majority non-Native curatorial team because the field suffered from a lack of investment in fostering new talent.
Building the exhibitions at FAM was undertaken by an all-Native curatorial team, supported by leadership from a majority-Native Board of Directors and executive staff, who worked through the responsibilities of engaging the thirty-nine tribes in Oklahoma to ensure their inclusion and authority within the planned exhibitions. Through these active consultations with the tribes, FAM built the galleries relying on shared authority with each tribe’s participation in a process of creating reference documents that provided an understanding of tribal ontologies, affirming the accuracy of historic information, and full authority over the selection of objects (specifically for a planned major loan from the National Museum of the American Indian).
From this effort of working with the tribes, the exhibitions benefitted from the active participation by tribal community members speaking truth to the historical impacts on our contemporary experience. Despite the depth of invested emotion, we were able to build stories that resist indulging in a position of victimization or sentimentality. Instead, we intentionally sought stories that magnify our diversity, amplify the depths of cultural strengths and ingenuity, and cultivated an emphasis for celebrating our resiliency and diversity. This allowed us to tell stories that are grounded in truthtelling, often incredibly painful stories of our histories. By expressing our grief, carried as part of our intergenerational trauma, we invite FAM visitors to witness and share it. This has been received as one of the strengths of the galleries.
Cultivating tribal relationships relied on a methodology that prioritized the collaborative process and working with the core tenets of Respect, Reciprocity, Relationships, and Responsibility. This was not an easy process as each relationship required a unique fostering of trust, active humility and listening, and continued willingness to seek solutions that were mutually beneficial. Building relationships with a tribal nation must start with recognizing that these are diplomatic acts; honoring tribal sovereignty was key to our success. Relying on that as a fact, the team used a complex matrix of pulse points in the exhibition, working through each with the participation of each tribe.
In many ways equally as daunting as building relationships with thirty-nine nations, we needed to work beyond the parameters of existing museological practice to honor our ancestors. Significant among these efforts was the writing of collection policies that directly address that FAM will not collect any known or potential objects stolen from the graves of our ancestors. We will only accept objects of potential ceremonial or cultural significance with the support and cooperation of the respective tribal nation. This practice and the commitment to working with the tribal nations as partners, beyond simply the advisory role often imagined as sufficient, has resulted in a level of respect and valued relationships that will benefit FAM’s goals and support tribal nations.
One of the key strategies we are fostering conceptually to decenter whiteness within our work is to imagine that our collections can be shared with the community. Not simply through exhibition, but in practice as a form of shared custody. We refuse to operate on the capitalistic assumption that ownership for collections practice prohibits activation of reciprocity. We imagine that we can carry the responsibilities for possessing objects in our collection AND share these objects with the communities by allowing full and active access, including the use of collection materials within community activities. This is made an imperative for us as we work with Indigenous philosophy that teaches that these objects are alive and want to be with their people, their languages, and the culture. As we imagine this for our institution, new potential is being cultivated that has been trapped as our cultural materials live trapped in the vaults of museums across the globe.
Working with Reciprocity, rejecting the transactional attitudes that have for too long been used as evidence of partnership and building trusted relationships with our tribal community constituents, has cultivated a mutual respect with the community (both Native and non-Native audiences) that is generating new expectations for acting responsibly. This complex approach has decentered whiteness while promoting respectful dialogue with all our audiences, donors, and, importantly, within our institution and tribal constituents. But the work is not completed.
As we move past opening and into the future as an operational museum, we recognize that we will need to continue playing a role in fostering opportunities for professionalism with emerging museum leaders. We understand that we have created a role to serve and support other museums to shift considerations for institutional practices in a range of areas, including policies, outreach, curatorial practices and decentering the authority of whiteness. We are a new institution, wrestling with the day-to-day realities of how we can best support and educate our visitors regarding the spectrum of the Indigenous identity and experience. What we have learned in the last five years is that this work is necessary, requires courage, and delivers a compound reward for all of our visitors, Native and others. We will continue to seek opportunities to grow and serve, doing our best at every turn, because that is what our ancestors have taught us is needed to survive.
