Part One: J. Anthony Paredes Memorial Plenary Decolonizing Both Anthropology and the Museum: Native American Practitioners’ Perspectives

J. Anthony Paredes Memorial Plenary Decolonizing Both Anthropology and the Museum: Native American Practitioners’ Perspectives

 

CHAIR: FAYARD, Kelly (Poarch Band of Creek Indians/Yale U)

 

ROUNDTABLE PARTiCIPANTS: AGUILAR, Joseph (San Ildefonso Pueblo/UPenn) VALLO, Brian (Acoma/SAR), CHAVEZ-LAMAR, Cynthia (Hope-Tewa/Navajo/Nat’l Museum of the American Indian), CHAVARRIA, Antonio (Santa Clara Pueblo/Museum of American Indian Arts and Culture)

 

FAYARD, Kelly (Yale U) Decolonizing Both Anthropology and the Museum: Native American Practitioners’ Perspectives. Both anthropology and museum collecting share a colonial past with a power imbalance between exogenous ethnographers and curators on the one hand, and the communities they seek to represent on the other. Native American communities, in particular, have been the subject of extensive anthropological research and museum collections but rarely control the presentations and images of their own culture. This session will discuss the transformations when Native American communities demand and achieve control of their own cultural property both in museums and via ethnographically collected materials such as language, oral narratives, and religious traditions. Examples of these transformative narratives will be presented by Native American representatives describing installations at the National Museum of the American Indian, the School for Advanced Research’s Indian Arts Research Center, and the Museum of American Indian Arts and Culture.

 

Session took place in Santa Fe, NM at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in March 2017.