Labor Exploitation and Invisibilization by Representation, White Harm
Back when I was a Mellon fellow, I worked at a museum representing Indigenous art. My position was funded as a means to diversify conservators and those interested in curatorial practice and/or Native art. Personally, the position represented a chance toward cultural patrimony and agency over the Western Art Canon, as well as the narratives constructed around objects held in perpetuity. It was a subtle way of taking back what was taken from us.
Before I was in museums, however, I worked at local arts organizations and an area gallery on the rich, white side of town. My positions were mostly related to sales and information; in each, I was usually the only BIPOC+ person. I was hired as a representative at the gallery—only because I was deemed “beautiful” enough to work. That is, before I had even proved I was capable of selling art or managing works on paper, as a Native woman in a gallery full of artists’ interpretations of them, to the owner I was already a sales point: a mere buying incentive.
Of course, I felt like a token. It was a misogynistic environment, and through many of my experiences at the gallery it would become clear to me that I needed to work somewhere where it was possible to not only be respected as a professional, but as an Indigenous woman.
When I was offered a fellowship job at an area museum specializing in Indigenous art for more money than I had ever made ($20/hour in 2018), I jumped. Working in “fellowship” with an institution is an opportunity that allows one to represent themselves, as well as the communities they bring with them. It was an opportunity to subvert certain narratives as they had been experienced. To me, it was important to advocate and care for objects that represented the people I knew: living artists, relatives, and craftspeople working from the rez to the city, both locally and internationally. And to do it honestly—not the way it had been told or shown to me by museums before.
What I wanted, envisioned, and idealized, however, was not what I came to experience. What followed instead was many levels of abuse—systemic and personal—that propelled my time at one of the “leading institutions” for Indigenous art. As a fellow, my ideas were often minimized; I was relegated to cataloging for days on end. Museum curators rolled their eyes at my colleagues and me and chastised us in front of visiting artists. Executive leadership made reparative promises as a result of major abuses that were later rescinded and lied about as if never discussed. As a result of my experience, my eyes were opened to a completely different view of how museums operate, their structures of abuse, as well as who they serve and have actually come to represent.
Institutional Culture
Cataloging, handling objects, cleaning bird poop from sculptures, reading and reviewing the collection. These tasks were all a part of the day-to-day as a fellow.
I shared a desk with two others. As a small cohort, we spent a lot of time reading and working together doing museum minutiae. When the office became too stuffy, I would take walks, sit outside, or peruse the galleries. Once as I was walking alone, a docent approached leading a large tour group and asked me loudly, “What part of the reservation are you from?” It was a shock to her that I was born and raised in Phoenix, as I promptly stated to the group. We would later be asked to continue educating this docent and others on contemporary experience for our own exhibitions, which were curated alongside the institutional team. After a tour of one of our major exhibitions, another docent asked me, “You’re so well spoken, did you go to college?”
These were crumbs on the way to an institutional rot that went all the way to the top, to be honest. Crumbs of an attitude developed in the 1970s, when the museum was partly anthropological, and one of the senior-most curators still working today actually began their career at the museum. At one time, there were human remains in the basement, and people dumped bodies on the doorstep. In critiquing some of the museum’s actions, attitudes, interpretations, and other forms of scholarship in response to lived experience, the word “decolonial” was often discouraged from use – by the director, and on behalf of one of the senior curators. The claim was that the audience just “wouldn’t understand” the term.
Once, on behalf of spelling a single word in the cataloging lexicon that would make it more accessible to native speakers, I was told, “Well you can’t undo decades of [anthropological] research.”
EDIA, the Pandemic, Accountability
During my time at this museum, the one EDIA survey that went out to staff was taken in 2020, prior to the heightening of the pandemic. A majority of the BIPOC+ workers who held positions at the institution at the time were on contract and did not have part or full-time status granting them a voice in the survey. As a result, the survey reflected the attitudes and comforts of a majority white staff, many of whom are or were not involved in social justice or undoing whiteness work and had actively expressed or previously exhibited behavior harmful to Native Artists, workers, and community members. Those BIPOC+ people who had experienced harm while working on contract at the museum were obviously excluded from sharing their experiences as a result.
Throughout the rest of 2020, Covid’s inaugural year, contract workers—native peoples without insurance—were left to navigate working under the duress of illness, as expectations and tensions tightened following layoffs of full and part-time staff. It is important to note that board and staff members have personal ties to former Governor Doug Ducey, and responses to and attitudes about the pandemic in retrospect actively reflected and supported the beliefs of Ducey’s administration. In spite of the overwhelming toll covid took on Indigenous communities, artists, workers, and peoples, the Museum was actively being guided throughout by people with ties to the management of that destruction, as well as conversations around that destruction.
Though it is just one egregious example of being entirely out of step with Indigenous communities, the museum’s executive leadership is also entirely out of touch with its staff. Glassdoor reviews from former employees who have left between 2020 and 2022 clearly reflect an attitude of disdain. Reports of sexual assault on the platform regarding a lack of HR, “exclusively catering to rich white people”, complaints about the COO, and a general impropriety around the Museum have been the only public attempts to hold the museum accountable. The Museum retains its COO, majority white and retired audience, and continues to utilize its fellowship structure as a pipeline to a museum career.
