scholarly journals A Pathway Home: Connecting Museum Collections with Native Communities

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 154
Author(s):  
Chavez Lamar

In 2016, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the Poeh Cultural Center, owned and operated by the Pueblo of Pojoaque in New Mexico, begin work on a loan of 100 ceramics in NMAI’s collections to the Poeh Cultural Center. Making loans to other institutions is regular practice for NMAI. In making loans to tribal museums and cultural centers, a loan can take on cultural and spiritual significance, which was the case for the Poeh Cultural Center and the community members it supports and represents. This article addresses the importance of connecting Native peoples with museum collections, which has the potential to contribute to community well-being, by featuring the partnership between NMAI and the Poeh Cultural Center.

Museum Worlds ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Peers

Access to heritage objects in museum collections can play an important role in healing from colonial trauma for indigenous groups by facilitating strengthened connections to heritage, to ancestors, to kin and community members in the present, and to identity. This article analyzes how touch and other forms of sensory engagement with five historic Blackfoot shirts enabled Blackfoot people to address historical traumas and to engage in ‘ceremonies of renewal’, in which knowledge, relationships, and identity are strengthened and made the basis of well-being in the present. The project, which was a museum loan and exhibition with handling sessions before the shirts were placed on displays, implies the obligation of museums to provide culturally relevant forms of access to heritage objects for indigenous communities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-518
Author(s):  
Birgit Däwes

AbstractIn the Western cultural archive from James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘noble savages’ to Gore Verbinsky’s 2013 reincarnation of The Lone Ranger, Indigenous American cultures have, for the longest time, been relegated to the past and framed in representations that either displace them into nostalgic folklore or declare them conveniently vanished. While non-Native cultural products such as literary texts, photographs, and paintings, as well as museum exhibitions have coded Indigenous identities as static opposites to modernity, and thus deprived them of a future in Western culture, contemporary Indigenous writers, artists, and curators use these same cultural channels to contest the semiotics of absence, to assert cultural sovereignty, and to empower alternative modes of knowledge. This article considers tribal museums as interventional archives of knowing – in Derrida’s sense of both “assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve” and of “consigning through gathering together signs” (1995/1996: 3; original emphasis). With examples from a Pueblo cultural context, including an exhibition at Disneyworld, Florida; the Sky City Cultural Center and Haak’u Museum in Acoma, New Mexico; as well as the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I trace the ways in which Native American museums strategically undermine what Mark Rifkin has termed “settler time” (2017: 9) and claim instead presence, sovereignty, inclusion, modernity, and futurity. In their specific outlines, these exhibits serve simultaneously as archives of Pueblo cultural heritage and as construction sites of temporality itself.1


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Jason Doyle ◽  
Kevin Filo ◽  
Alana Thomson ◽  
Thilo Kunkel

Delivering community-based benefits is oftentimes cited to justify the high costs associated with hosting large-scale events. The current research is embedded in positive psychology to examine how an event impacts host community members’ PERMA domains, reflected through positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Adopting a longitudinal approach, the authors interviewed 15 host community members before and after a large-scale sport event to determine if and how the event impacted their well-being. The findings uncovered evidence that the event activated positive emotions, relationships, and meaning across both phases, and evidence of accomplishment within the postevent phase. The findings contribute to the knowledge by examining the links between large-scale sport events and well-being throughout the event lifecycle. This research forwards implications for event bidding committees, event organizers, and host community officials to maximize community well-being through hosting large-scale events and to help justify associated expenses from a social–psychological perspective.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Farmer ◽  
Tracy De Cotta ◽  
Katharine McKinnon ◽  
Jo Barraket ◽  
Sarah-Anne Munoz ◽  
...  

Purpose This paper aims to explore the well-being impacts of social enterprise, beyond a social enterprise per se, in everyday community life. Design/methodology/approach An exploratory case study was used. The study’s underpinning theory is from relational geography, including Spaces of Wellbeing Theory and therapeutic assemblage. These theories underpin data collection methods. Nine social enterprise participants were engaged in mental mapping and walking interviews. Four other informants with “boundary-spanning” roles involving knowledge of the social enterprise and the community were interviewed. Data were managed using NVivo, and analysed thematically. Findings Well-being realised from “being inside” a social enterprise organisation was further developed for participants, in the community, through positive interactions with people, material objects, stories and performances of well-being that occurred in everyday community life. Boundary spanning community members had roles in referring participants to social enterprise, mediating between participants and structures of community life and normalising social enterprise in the community. They also gained benefit from social enterprise involvement. Originality/value This paper uses relational geography and aligned methods to reveal the intricate connections between social enterprise and well-being realisation in community life. There is potential to pursue this research on a larger scale to provide needed evidence about how well-being is realised in social enterprises and then extends into communities.


2006 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS E. EVELYN

The mission of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian is to affirm to Native communities and the non-Native public the historical and contemporary culture and cultural achievements of the Natives of the Western Hemisphere by advancing, in consultations, collaboration and cooperation with them, a knowledge and understanding of their cultures, including art, history and language, and by recognizing the Museum's special responsibility, through innovative public programming, research and collections, to protect, support and enhance the development, maintenance and perpetuation of Native culture and community. Adopted 1990.


Author(s):  
Christine M. DeLucia

This chapter examines how King Philip’s War gave rise to a significant but often ignored or misperceived history of bondage, enslavement, and diaspora that took Native Americans far from their northeast homelands, and subjected them to a range of brutal conditions across an Atlantic World. It focuses on Algonquians’ transits into captivity as a consequence of the war, and historicizes this process within longer trajectories of European subjugation of Indigenous populations for labor. The chapter examines how Algonquian individuals and families were forcibly placed into New England colonial as well as Native communities at the war’s conclusion, and how others were transported out of the region for sale across the Atlantic World. The case of King Philip’s wife and son is especially complex, and the chapter considers how traditions around their purported sale into slavery in Bermuda interact with challenging racial politics and archival traces. Modern-day “reconnection” events have linked St. David’s Island community members in Bermuda to Native American tribes in New England. The chapter also reflects on wider dimensions of this Algonquian diaspora, which likely brought Natives to the Caribbean, Azores, and Tangier in North Africa, and propelled Native migrants/refugees into Wabanaki homelands.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 51-77
Author(s):  
André Prost ◽  
Alexi Popov

Investigation of a large collection of Neuroptera from Northeastern Nigeria stored untouched in alcohol for four decades in the National Museum of Natural History, Sofia, provided the opportunity to examine unpublished specimens and conduct a thorough review of published literature, establishing the first comprehensive inventory of Ascalaphidae, Palparidae, and Myrmeleontidae of Northeastern Nigeria to date. Specimens had been collected between 1976 and 1978 in Northeastern Nigeria, mostly in Jos City and Plateau State. Five species of Ascalaphidae, four of Palparidae, and 26 of Myrmeleontidae were identified. Bankisus beroni sp. n. and Creoleon nigrithorax sp. n. are described. Gymnoleon gaillardi is not considered a synonym of Gymnoleon exilis and a new synonymy is established: Gymnoleon externus (Navás, 1911) (= Gymnoleon gaillardi Navás, 1912, syn. n.). An examination of unpublished specimens in museum collections and an exhaustive literature review were conducted in order to draw up a comprehensive inventory of the fauna of Northeastern Nigeria, which to date comprises 11 species of Ascalaphidae, 12 species of Palparidae, and 34 species of Myrmeleontidae, of which one species of Ascalaphidae, two species of Palparidae, and 16 species of Myrmeleontidae, as well as the genera Brevibarbis, Bankisus, and Capicua, had not been reported to occur in Nigeria. The chorological information on the genus Bankisus is reviewed, the ranges of the species are critically discussed and corrected, and all known localities are indicated on a map. Bankisus oculatus is reported for the first time from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The first recording of Centroclisis lineatipennis in West Africa is reported. Palpares cataractae and Palpares radiatus are deleted from the list of Nigerian fauna. With these new records, the known ranges of eight species are extended by more than 1400 km. In the process of assessing the geographical distribution of species present in Northeastern Nigeria, six species, as well as the genera Myrmecaelurus and Cueta and the tribe Nesoleontini, are reported for the first time from Burkina Faso.


Herpetozoa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 141-147
Author(s):  
Daniel Jablonski ◽  
Addison Wynn ◽  
Rafaqat Masroor ◽  
Theodore Papenfuss ◽  
Spartak N. Litvinchuk ◽  
...  

We provide the first comprehensive data on the questionable distribution of the genus Pelophylax and the family Ranidae from Pakistan. Based on a literature review and two specimens of the genus from Tasp, Panjgur District in Pakistani Balochistan (USNM 26194–95), stored in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, USA, we discuss the possible occurrence and affiliation of these frogs in the context of Central Asia. Our comparison shows that the nearest records of Pelophylax in relation to the Tasp specimens are reported from more than 280 km (air-line) away in Iran and Afghanistan, which are currently separated by hot and mostly desert environments. We suggest that possible surviving populations of this genus may still be present in Balochistan (Rakhshan River) or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Kabul River) Provinces of Pakistan. This would, however, need further field investigations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S830-S830
Author(s):  
Steffi M Kim ◽  
Jordan P Lewis

Abstract The psychological construct of generativity encompasses a person’s motivation to leave a legacy for future generations by investing in acts that will outlive the self (Ericson, 1950). Lewis and Allen (2017) outlined the importance of generativity within AN cultures (caring for the future of our youth) and expanded Erikson’s western-based definition by adding the indigenous cultural generativity component to describe and incorporate Alaska Native specific cultural elements. These culturally based elements involve giving back to family and community including guidance and teaching of future generations (Lewis & Allen, 2017). Generativity within western societies accentuates independent achievements and successes more than the notion to care for future generations. This study is part of a larger community-based, exploratory, study between researchers and communities to explore successful aging that included 42 Alaska Native Elders in the Norton-Sound subregion, 21 Alaska Native Elders from the Aleutian Pribilof Islands, and 26 Elders from the Bristol Bay region. Qualitative interviews explored the participant’s life, influences on aging well, and their aging process. Thematic analysis was used to investigate the impact of generativity on successful aging was used to establish codes and main themes based on the three different cultural regions of Alaska. The findings suggest that generativity promotes successful aging. Elders who live in communities that promote community engagement, support family and school activities, and maintain and/or revitalize culture and traditions reported increased emotional well-being. Results can guide communities to incorporate or support cultural activities that promote generative activities and meaningful engagement which fosters successful aging.


1991 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-337
Author(s):  
Donald L. Wolberg

This is the fourth in a series of notices recording the transfer of fossils described by Rousseau H. Flower (1913-1988) (Wolberg, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c). It was Rousseau's expressed wish that this material be reposited in the Smithsonian Institution/U.S. National Museum. Similarly, the New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources is concerned that the fossils be adequately cared for and readily available to those scientists with an interest in the material.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document