Museum Studies Commons^™

How Wendy Red Star Decolonizes The Museum With Humor And Play, Salma Monani, Nicole Seymour

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

Museums play a prominent role in crafting racial narratives in the United States, and as evidenced by recent social uprisings, these institutions have come under scrutiny. Take, for example, the statue outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which depicts U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt on horseback flanked by a Black man and an American Indian, both unnamed. As National Public Radio reported in June 2020, “The statue was intended to pay homage to Roosevelt as a ‘devoted naturalist and author of works on natural history,’” but, in calling for its removal, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office affirmed …

Cheenama The Trail Maker: An Indian Idyll Of Old Ontario Indigenous Ethnographic Films Of The 20th Century, Sarah Charette

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

Ethnographic films of the early twentieth century, intended to document and reproduce the cultural practices, living conditions, and identities of Indigenous populations, were often rife with colonial assumptions, staged events, abnormal or uncommon practices, and the active silencing of Indigenous perspectives. Cheenama the Trailmaker: An Indian Idyll of Old Ontario, produced in 1935 by the Canadian Museum of History, attempts to recreate the day-to-day life of an Algonquin family in pre-contact North America.

Beginning with a comparative analysis of the film itself, this essay uses empirical evidence from the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan to paint a picture of the accuracy …

Northwest Coast Native Art Beyond Revival, 1962–1992, Christopher T. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Histories of “primitivism” in the avant-garde show that Euro-American modernism was always engaged in the appropriation of nonwestern and Indigenous art, with particular interest in Northwest Coast Native art forms by the Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and Indian Space Painters. However, there has been little consideration for how Northwest Coast Native artists chose to engage with the styles and tenets of Western modern art. To date, the history of post-war Northwest Coast Native art has been dominated by what is known as the Renaissance, a narrative in which artists pursued a neo-traditional style in modern times through the recovered and revival …