Description
Since it opened in 2004, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) has served as a site for mutual learning and knowledge exchange. Tribes have made use of the Museum’s extensive collections to recover and illuminate their cultural heritage—language, religion, artistic practices—which is embedded and encoded in objects. At the same time, tribes provide curators insight into the meaning, significance, and use of collection objects.
This exchange of knowledge is not only a private one. NMAI is committed to the belief that Native cultures are not museum pieces but complex, living and lived phenomena; and that the Museum’s collections are made more meaningful when the cultural groups that produced them are present and active in the Museum. Therefore, NMAI has made its facilities available to tribes not only to engage with the collections but also to enact their cultural practices in public.
To date, a number of tribes have taken advantage of this opportunity, spending time with curators and the collections to deepen tribal and curatorial understanding and bringing cultural practitioners to the Museum for festivals that spotlight artistic and other cultural activities. Both the Museum and the tribe have benefited from the exchange. But less well-resourced tribes have been unable to take advantage of this opportunity. Very small tribes like the Pomo and the Miwok of California and larger communities from impoverished reservations like the Lakota of Pine Ridge and Rosebud cannot afford the trip to Washington; still, they have rich cultural traditions which are well-represented in the NMAI’s collections.
The Museum therefore proposes to build a “Bridge to the Collections.” Through this program, Museum staff would, over two years, identify up to four tribal communities with the capacity to make use of the NMAI’s collections—but without the necessary financial resources. NMAI would work closely with the tribes, visiting their home communities, identifying tribal, cultural, and artistic leaders to form project teams, and developing engagement plans. Each tribal project team would then visit Washington, spending several days with curators and working intensively with the collections in the Museum’s Cultural Resources Center, the storage facility in Suitland, MD.
Based in part on their learning during their visits, the project teams would organize return visits to Washington, bringing larger tribal delegations to present cultural festivals to the public and to spend time with the collections as well.
NMAI has observed that deep engagement by tribal leaders with the collections paired with the experience of planning and executing a cultural festival can strengthen a tribe’s cultural leadership and help to build that tribe’s organizational capacity and cultural vitality.
The Luce Foundation’s grant would enable four tribal communities to participate in the Bridge program. Grant monies would be used to support the visits by NMAI staff to the tribes, the tribes’ visits to Washington, and the costs of presenting the cultural festivals. NMAI would cover its own staff costs.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $250,000 to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to enable less well-resourced tribes to use, study, and illuminate the Museum’s collections.
Approved by Board: November 2, 2017
